Review on Brother DS700D Compact Duplex Scanner by Christopher Millet

From a hardware perspective, this scanner deserves 5 stars. It has several commendable qualities: it generally works well, especially for single-pass duplex scanning; processes leaves quickly; scans PDF or JPEG from good to high quality; moves easily from one computer to another; easy to calibrate; comes with a good, if not the most protective, case (and there don't seem to be any hard cases on the aftermarket, at least not on Revain); and has software that works. I usually use Scan to PDF, open documents in Acrobat Pro and OCR and for this purpose Scanner is the winner. But I couldn't believe a product of this quality would ship without a quick start sheet. Is it really too much to ask? Hardware that costs a third as much as, say, a Logitech or Microsoft mouse comes with these manuals, usually in multiple languages. With this scanner, one has to hope that instead of just plugging it into a USB port, you've looked at the CD that comes with it, or noticed a small protrusion at the end of the USB cable that prompts you to install the software first. This is minimalism taken to the extreme. Recommendation. An old favorite were the early Visioneer handheld scanners that came out about ten years ago; this one, especially with the duplex function, is better.