Review on Brother DS 940DW Wireless Compact Document by Mark Taylor

It I rarely write scathing reviews, but this will be one of them. The cons of this scanner far outweigh the pros. Pros: - It scans fairly quickly for a small device - It scans duplex (one of the HUGE reasons I bought this device over anyone else) - Can connect to your computer via Wi-Fi, . but . (see below) Disadvantages: - You cannot be online at the same time as scanning. You are connecting TO the scanner, not FROM it (ie the scanner is not connected to the network, you are connecting to it). Because of this, it behaves like a special connection, so you literally cannot connect to the internet while the scan is running. So although you can connect to it wirelessly, you can ONLY scan things and not listen to streaming music or Netflix, for example. Scan quality at default settings is poor and blurry, even with good original documents and scanning techniques. - It's fast, but not fast enough for reasonably acceptable blur. - It can scan at up to 600 dpi, but it's terribly slow. - Scanning software for Mac (version 9 if you get an updated version) is absolutely TERRIBLE and here's why: . When scanning more than 25/30 pages, the application will be forcibly closed. I scanned a 50 page package which caused it to close multiple times. I went through the pages after reopening and saved some pages. I looked through the rest of the pages, it closed again and opened again. That saved a few more pages. Rinse and repeat 5 or 6 times and I FINALLY have a proper scan. I then had to wait 5 minutes or more for it to actually save to a single file as converting to PDF with OCR seems to be a 'new technology' for this software. I used OCR over 10 years ago and can't remember it taking as long and being as inaccurate as this app. . When exporting a .pdf file with saved OCR data, the file sizes are HUGE. Some 10 page very easy to read bills ended up taking up 30-40MB. - A 50 page document weighed 200MB (and the original was VERY clear/smear free etc.). The software is extremely archaic. No blank page detection, even if you want it. . Big task app just sits there and freezes, seemingly frozen app. Sometimes letting it process will kill it and sometimes force close the app. . When I scanned the png pages (a fairly raw file format with very minimal compression so scanning/saving shouldn't take too long), the image cleaned up a bit, but scanning a 10-20 page file literally took > 5 minutes /load/save with a USB connected device to the computer - The UI with the buttons on the device is terrible - The iOS app was absolutely useless. Same problem as with the special connection described above. There is no internet at all. Most disappointing was that the "software" consisted mostly of links to websites. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to get the external drive working with my Mac, only to find out that the software might have been hyperlinked. This thing literally took over 45 minutes to get everything up and running. Other scanners can go from packaging to scanning in less than 5 minutes. If you haven't figured it out already, I was NOT impressed with this scanner or its hardware. I spent too much on it to keep so I'm returning it for something that works. I have a Brother laser printer so I thought it would be just as impressive and easy to use as the printer itself. It was absolutely not true. Don't bother.