Brother ADS-4100

Is the Brother ADS-4100 worth buying?

Yes, the Brother ADS-4100 is worth buying if your working day is built around batch scanning: £304.96 buys 35 pages per minute duplex, a 60-sheet feeder and a 5,000-sheet daily duty cycle. A department that clears invoices, contracts and forms every morning gets that money back within a couple of months of saved feeding.

It is the wrong machine for a home user who scans a few letters a week, and the 3.9 rating from 16 owners makes the owner record thin rather than poor. The hardware is aimed at desks where the scanner never stops, which is why it trades Wi-Fi and a flatbed for throughput.

What does the Brother ADS-4100 cost per page per minute?

Divide the £304.96 price by 35 pages per minute and the Brother ADS-4100 works out at £8.71 for every page per minute it scans. Both sides come through in a single pass at 35 ppm, or 70 images per minute, in colour and in black and white, so a 60-sheet stack is finished in under two minutes of feeding.

That £8.71 sits £2.02 better than the Epson WorkForce ES-500WII at £10.73 and within 9p of the ScanSnap iX2500 in white at £8.62, which costs £83.04 more to buy. The practical reading is straightforward: this is a fast scanner at a mid-market price, and the speed is the reason to pick it over a £139 portable doing 15 ppm.

What comes in the box with the Brother ADS-4100?

The box holds the Brother ADS-4100 desktop document scanner on its own, and a one-year manufacturer warranty covers it. There is no wireless radio inside, so it needs a USB port on a computer, and Linux counts among the supported systems if that is what your office runs.

It measures 21.6 cm deep, 30 cm wide and 19.1 cm tall, and weighs 2.6 kg, so it is smaller than a feeder-and-flatbed machine but still a permanent desk resident. It draws 23 watts while scanning, and the 600 dpi CMOS sensor with an LED light source keeps running costs low. Colour goes in at 48 bits and comes out at 24 bits, with 8-bit greyscale for straightforward text work.

Where does the Brother ADS-4100 fall short?

There is no flatbed on the Brother ADS-4100, so a passport, a stapled form or a page inside a bound book stops the job dead. It is also a tethered machine: USB only, with no Wi-Fi, so it has to sit within cable reach of a computer rather than on a shelf across the room.

At 600 dpi optical it is built for documents rather than photographs, and anyone scanning prints or slides will want a flatbed with a far higher figure. The 16 owners who have rated it at 3.9 mean you are buying the specification and the brand more than a long trail of user reports.

How does the Brother ADS-4100 compare with the alternatives?

The Epson WorkForce DS-1730 asks £259.99 against the Brother's £304.96 and adds a flatbed for the originals a feeder cannot take, though it scans 30 ppm rather than 35. Choose the ADS-4100 for pure paper throughput, and the DS-1730 if passports, books or embossed cards ever cross your desk.

The ScanSnap iX2500 in white costs £83.04 more and gives you a 100-sheet feeder, Wi-Fi and a 5-inch touchscreen on top of the same 45 ppm class of speed, at £8.62 per page per minute against £8.71 here. Buy the Brother if the scanner lives beside one PC; buy the iX2500 if you want the batch feeder and the wireless link.