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Dante Obong photo
Switzerland, Bern
1 Level
688 Review
26 Karma

Review on πŸ“Έ Brother ADS-1250W Wireless Portable Compact Desktop Scanner - Fast, Easy-to-Use Scanning for Home, Home Office, or Mobile Professionals by Dante Obong

Revainrating 3 out of 5

Mixed feelings about scanners and accessories

The attitude towards this scanner is very mixed. On the plus side, for $230 it's a pretty good machine. It's on par with Fujitsu's sheet-fed scanners, which cost hundreds more. Scanning is fast, quality is good (if you can get it to work) and the sheet feeder works reliably. Then again, it's definitely a personal item. The first rebellious teenager trying to scan a document is likely to break off parts of the fragile plastic feed guides. In addition, all the negatives are associated with the software and configuration. As many have noted, there's no USB cable included, so forget setting it up until you get one of those fancy USB3 cables it needs. Theoretically, you can also set up your scanner for network operation without a USB cable. However, the above procedure for this just doesn't work. And it doesn't matter anyway: once you've set up the scanner with the USB cable, the "Scan" button doesn't work YET unless the scanner is hardwired. I was curious what response the scanner expected from the network, so I hooked up a network sniffer, software that catalogs and stores every packet of data that appears on the network. I can see network configuration data being sent to the scanner from the Mac Config app and the scanner seems to be accepting it with no problem. But when you press the scan button, the scanner does absolutely nothing. It doesn't even try to contact the intended recipient of the scanned data on the network. I would advise buyers to think of this thing as a wired scanner. Just ignore the intended network features. They work well enough to tempt you to spend a few hours setting them up.

Pros
  • Makes me happy
Cons
  • Bad instructions