Features:

  • FAST SCANNING: Scan single and double-sided materials in a single pass, in both black-and-white and color, at speeds of up to 40 pages per minute
  • MULTI-PAGE SCANNING FEATURES: Select 2-in-1 mode to capture 11″ × 17″ documents or continuous scan mode to scan unlimited pages into a single file
  • FLEXIBLE MEDIA HANDLING: Scan photos, documents, receipts, embossed plastic cards, business cards, and more in color and black and white
  • DIRECT SCANNING VIA WIRELESS: The wireless networking with Web Connect allows direct scanning to cloud applications, including Google Drive and more
  • Operating system compatibility is windows xp 32-bit only, windows vista, windows 7, windows 8, windows 8.1, windows 10, mac OS X v10.8.x and up and linux
  • OUTSTANDING CUSTOMER SUPPORT: Includes a one-year limited warranty and free phone, online and chat technical support for the life of the product
Thanks Brother for a great product, and thanks to Amazon for their great ...

I purchased this Brother ADS-2800 scanner for my daughter as she and her husband have a business, but after 15-20 years she's running out of cabinet space, LOL. So, after receiving this scanner she setup her QNAP TS-469 Pro server to several different folder pertaining to their business and assigned them to the convenient buttons on her touch screen and away she went. After a month, she is about half way through. She also found an App on her QNAP server called 'Qfile' that allows her to load into her husbands phone. Now he can pull-up any job he's ever done for anyone. So, needless to say if she could give this Brother ADS-2800 scanner Six Stars, she would. The color 'touch screen' on the front panel is absolutely is a feature she loves and could not do without. Thanks Brother for a great product, and thanks to Amazon for their great service.

The best sheetfed scanner I have found

This is a review for the ADS-2800W. I was concerned about this product based on the reviews, but it really stands out compared to the other two sheetfed scanners that I tried: the Epson FF-680W and PlusTek eScan180. Unlike other reviewers say, the processing time is not bad and the scanner is quick. The lower the file size, the shorter the processing time. The Epson scanner has no controls from the scanner itself and cannot scan to a network location as far as I can tell, so it requires a computer to be connected and does not work as a stand alone device. The PlusTek scanner has a nice big touch screen on the device, but has no web-based management console, so all the settings have to be changed directly on the device, which can be cumbersome. The scan quality is also better for photos than for documents (ever crease and wrinkle in documents show up in scans and there is no way to remove these). The Brother scanner is MUCH faster than the PlusTek. It scans with efficiency and speed. Paper generally feeds straight, but in the event it is crooked, the scanner automatically straightens the image, and does an excellent job of it. The scanner has a great web console that allows users to set up quick buttons on the scanner for quick access to customized settings and network locations (these are called "profiles"). The documentation is poor so I had some frustration figuring out how to get the web console to work, but once I figured it out, it works really well. The scanner also feeds smaller papers, like receipts and checks, quite well. The only downside is that this scanner does not perform OCR when saving to a network location, but I have not found another scanner that includes this capability. Overall very happy with the scanner for speed, reliability, and customizability with the web management console. The biggest downside of this scanner is the poor documentation and tech support. It is important to know that the default password on the web console is "initpass" For some strange reason, this information is not included in the manual anywhere. I spend 30 minutes on the phone with tech support and got nowhere. Finally I located the password with a web search.

Works with linux and as standalone scanner!

Thanks Brother! Latest linux driver works perfectly with simple scan on Ubuntu. Less than one day installed, but so far, it does everything I expected. Setup of the Apps (gdrive, evernote, etc.) was a breeze and allows you to scan without connecting to pc. Update: Tip for scanning receipts: Scanning a flimsy receipt is not pleasant with this scanner. This isn't a knock on the scanner though. For the most part, the scanner will scan receipts fine, but its cumbersome to load long receipts in a scanner - especially if they are wrinkled. To be clear this is not a negative on this scanner, but just the dynamics of feeding a long, narrow and flimsy sheet of paper in the feeder. I'm sure the included carrier feed would circumvent this issue, but it requires and extra step which isn't practical for me. In my effort to find the best cloud destination for my scanned items, I discovered the nuances between using google drive and evernote. Although both services scans receipts via the mobile phone app without issue, I narrowly decided google drive is much quicker at the initial capture. It appears google drive app on android does post processing which makes it faster at capturing the image than evernote. Conversely, evernote attempts to outline the receipt in real time, which requires you to have to wait for it to recognize the receipts border before capturing. Although this is impressively fast, most of the time it's still significantly slower than google drive scan solution, which is as quick at taking a photo. The other benefit of using a mobile app to scan your receipts is that you can obviously scan the receipt as soon as you receive it (please don't do this in the checkout line though) vs having to wait until you get to your scanner. I'm loving this solution for receipts as it making going paperless that much more effortless.

Amazing Scanner

My wife and I bought this to replace the scanner that was on one of those cheap little all-in-one deals. You know the kind: It has a scanner on the top that accepts a single (one-sided) page at a time and really works best for scanning photos ... not documents. It died, and so we started shopping for a replacement. See, the problem is that we scan a _LOT_ of documents. We homeschool our (three) children and I'm a big IT Geek (a programmer) meaning I like having all of my paper documents backed up on my (very nice, and very expensive) server. Scanning has always been a real pain and a chore for us. One side of one sheet of paper at a time. Moreover, we had to drag out a USB Key so that we could scan each document to it, then move that to one of our PCs so that we could pull the document off of the USB Key and move it onto the server. A real chore that was super time consuming because of all of the manual intervention involved. This scanner has absolutely everything that I wanted: 1. It is WiFi Capable (and offers manual configuration instead of only WPS - this is a real gem, as I don't use a store-bought router, and my Ubiquiti Access Point absolutely does not offer WPS WiFi configuration!). 2. It can scan directly to a Network Share. Oh sweet loving heavens, I cannot tell you how much time this single feature alone has saved me in moving files off of USB Drives and onto my Network Drives. 3. It is lightning fast. Seriously, with it's other features I can just turn the scan on and walk away - which is amazing - but this sucker is so fast that ... well, you'll see. 4. It just works. Very - very - minimal setup even for me, and I'm betting my setup is far more advanced than your average user. I set up multiple profiles for one-button scanning of different document types. It will save them automatically to the correct network drive based on the profile for all of our document types based on just one button. Default settings for how it scans and saves each page are configured, and I can modify them prior to initiating a scan job easily and intuitively. Let me give you the best example that I can of how wonderful this little machine is. Among all of our homeschool , we have text books, answer books ... and test books. I used our History test book as a trial case: It had 60ish (double-sided) pages, wherein each page equaled a single test (small test, kind of stuff we hand out weekly to the kids). The settings I used were to scan each double-sided page as an individual PDF document (so we'd have one PDF for each page - or roughly 120 PDFs at the end) and save them all to the predetermined network drive. With our previous scanner, we could scan 5-10 pages before it would just start crapping out on us and telling us the USB Drive was full (it wasn't). And it would take ages. I sat the entire 60ish pages into the scanner, hit a couple of buttons, and somewhere around 60 seconds later (I didn't actually time it, I didn't think to) it was done. No muss, no fuss, and I now have 115 PDFs in my network share ready for use. It ain't cheap, but we will absolutely get our money's worth out of this thing. If you are looking to scan documents (not pictures), scan a lot of them, not have to hassle with configuration, setup, fiddling with USB Keys all the time, and for the thing to just work no matter what you throw at it ... then this little guy will do the job. Cannot stress enough how happy I am with this thing.

My Favorite Gadget

Hands down the best money I've ever spent. I've always wanted one of these. It's used daily. I use it to scan docs to a QNAP NAS, no PC needed whatsoever. Drop the doc in and it scans to pdf and writes out to NAS at specific location and then use QSIRCH on qnap to index. PROS Scan directly to dropbox, gdrive, onedrive, box, NAS/network locations or emailed web based interface from PC, Touch screen on the device. OCR, searchable PDFs multiple shortcuts can be added, one touch shortcuts allow you to hit one button and go. Fast scans - Both sides of document scanned at once. Was able to scan anything from a business card to 8 1/2 x whatever pages Software isn't bloat and mostly useful blank page detection CONS PC free OCR is done via brother servers. Upload to brother, ocr then handed off from there.- some security risks here. because of the above behavior, OCR'd documents cannot be sent to network location but rather have to go to Dropbox/etc or be emailed to you. Then sorted through to get into the right places. Repeat. . . .not a photo scanner Very touchy jam mechanism, some things simply cannot be scanned without snagging once or twice.

this has been a great purchase. The features are pretty decent

For the money, this has been a great purchase. The features are pretty decent, and operationally there have not been any problems. It gets daily use and I hear no complaints of feed jam problems. The touch screen is a little small, but definitely usable and legible. The web interface is probably the weakest part of the machine, but only in the fact that it's a bit spartan and setting up the scan-to-disk option is the typical 'janky' Brother interface. It works, but it's not terribly intuitive and if you are not an IT person, and may present some challenges for domain server based setups. This is typical of HP, Brother, etc., they all suck. If you are trying to get this feature to work with a Mac OS based computer, it may also prove difficult, but again, it's typical of this feature on virtually all manufacturers, not just Brother. For the money, it's a great buy. I paid around 400 for it on Amazon and relative to higher priced machines of 1500-2500 dollars, you can't go wrong. I could replace it 3-4 times for the cost of the next highest priced 'enterprise grade' machine. We do not use the desktop software that is available for this device, only the non-OS specific network scan functions.

Works as a standalone scanner to USB key

I'm not writing reviews more than once or twice/year, but this time I really feel like I have to. I'm a long time Linux user. While I do own a Mac, it's a laptop and it's for the road only and there's no way I'm going to plug a USB cable into a scanner at home. All boxes in the home run Linux. So drivers have been a nightmare most of my life. I don't buy devices I can't run. I'm not a pedant, we really just don't have a Windows box here. So as you can imagine, a great deal of research goes into making sure the few devices I do own work with a Linux box, standard formats, or stand on their own. If you're one of us, you understand. I'm also at a stage of life where I just don't have the time to fiddle with my computers too much anymore-I'd rather be doing something else than to download and update poorly written open source drivers for commercial things I need. So basically, I was looking for a scanner that I will use for a long time, that is, at minimum: - Scans to a regular USB key - Does not require a computer to operate - Can produce PDFs directly, without software - Is fast enough to scan away 100's of pages of documents I hesitated for a very long time between getting the Brother ADS-2700W or the ADS-2800W. I simply couldn't ascertain whether the smaller 2700W was able to operate on its own, and could be configured on the network via an HTTP interface (again, no drivers). It seems like the cheaper little cousin of the 2800W. They've made an HTML manual only. The 2800W and its family look the same, and they're sold under the umbrella of "small business", they look more serious. Anyhow, not being sure, I bought the 2800W. So this 2800W arrived in the mail today. In less than 5 minutes, I did the following: - Unpacked and plugged in - Turned it on, did not configure anything - Plugged a USB key into it - Put a 3 page document into it - Selected "Scan to USB" from the top-level menu - Put a document into it and pressed its "Start" button. - Moved the USB key over to my computer - Witnessed on my computer (no drivers) a beautiful 300dpi PDF scan of all my pages, both sides and perfectly aligned. It works. I'm really quite satisfied already. This is a very basic review, but I know for sure there are others like me looking for a standalone device, and here I confirm this is one.

Crazy Fast Standalone Network Scanner

Bought the ADS 2800W after a lengthy research. I needed a reasonably fast scanner that can be moved around and plugged into my network as a standalone device to digitize documents in file cabinets at different locations. It had to be reasonably fast and feed reliably multiple paper sources and formats, including receipts and biz card. Needed the scanner to upload to a folder on a Qnap NAS and have OCR automatically performed by a static Windows 10 workstation. The printer had to have TWAIN/WIA/ISIS drivers to run 3-party apps so that I am not at the mercy of a single vendor. The final hardware-Software pairing was with Nuance Power PDF Advanced 3, which had the automatic OCR feature at a reasonable price. ABBYY Fine Reader Corporate does the same but costs 2-4 times more (depends on where you buy it), with relatively similar OCR accuracy. Since all OCR conversion to Searchable PDF is in the background by Power PDF, conversion speed was a non-issue especially on a i9-9900K CPU. Idea is to do bulk scanning to different customized profiles so that I can set different file prefixes for different categories of documents (receipts, statements, invoices, manuals etc). Customization/configurations was done via web browser, very straight forward but took a while to find the default password, which is "initpass". The profile customization is very flexible, only thing missing is the ability to un-select the Multifeed Detection in the profile, which you may want for odd-ball paper or 2-1 scan using the plastic sleeve. Scanning via the touch screen to Network into image PDF, the average speed is around 41-42ppm (82-84 ipm) @ 300 dpi color duplex medium file size. No lag between mix of double sided printed documents and single sided sheets. Time between pressing START and the roller feeding is about 1 sec, transmission at end of scan to NAS seems to be unnoticeable on a wired network as it is roughly done by the time I pull the papers from the out tray. The Apps that came with the scanner I ended up uninstalling. Its OK for general use, just not for my specific application. Have to say Paperport's UI can benefit from some updating, looks really dated. Printer came with K version firmware, updating to N version was simple. Not much YouTube reviews on this scanner and spec is conflicting, with many places still listing it as 30ppm instead of 40ppm. Overall, couldn't be happier and relieved by my choice to go with ADS 2800W. Very well made and great performance to my surprise, I was really hesitant to buy this unit (thus the lengthy research) as the price to feature+performance was a bit too good to be true, now I am a convert to Brother products. Works great for my specific needs although it was a hair over my budget. The best feature loaded and commercial grade performance scanner for the price. Great job by the scanner design team @ Brother!

Need a scanner, not a printer? This is perfect!

Awesome! So many features and exactly what we need. Needing a scanner then having to buy one with a printer attached is a joke, the size of this is perfect! Also, this scanner does not rely on a computer in order to email attachments. I bought 5 of these and we love them!

Anytime your wife calls hardware "sexy" you know you have a winner.

The headline pretty much sums this critter up completely. My wife has to scan things often for work. Add to that 35 years of tax returns and other things that are taking up space and you now know why I was leaning toward such a nice device. Setup was pretty straightforward although not quite as intuitive as I would have hoped. There are combinations of options needed to create profiles. Not a big deal but I did forget how to do something a week after I set things up initially. I have not tried some of the more advanced things yet but I have setup email and network (ftp to network attached storage device) and workstation deliveries. All work well. Scan quality is excellent and at 300dpi the thing is blazingly fast.

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