Brother DS-940DW

Is the Brother DS-940DW worth buying?

The Brother DS-940DW is worth buying at £179.48 if your scanning happens away from a desk, because it carries its own battery and its own Wi-Fi in a 590 g body. It scans both sides of an A4 sheet in one pass at 15 pages per minute, so a two-sided contract goes through once rather than twice. Nothing else in this range does that without a socket.

957 owners rate it 4.0, which is the honest shape of the deal: people like the portability and pay for it. Buy it for the battery and the radio rather than for throughput, because the same 15 ppm sits in a cheaper machine that never leaves the house.

What does the Brother DS-940DW cost per page per minute?

Divide the £179.48 price by the 15 pages per minute it scans and you get £11.97 for every page per minute, the highest figure of any duplex scanner in this range. The 15 ppm part of that sum is not the expensive bit. The £40.48 that sits on top of the wired Brother DS-740D is what the battery and the Wi-Fi cost you, and that is the whole decision in one number.

In use the machine itself is quick enough: 200 pages would take it about a quarter of an hour of actual scanning, and it draws 3.6 W, less than a typical LED bulb, which is why a battery this small can carry it. The time goes on loading, one sheet at a time, not on the scanning.

What comes in the box and how does it fit on a desk?

One scanner and its document management software arrive together, and Brother's free iPrint&Scan app lets a phone view and share whatever you have just scanned. Nothing else is required to start: the DS-940DW runs on its own battery over Wi-Fi, or off a USB 3.0 cable, so there is no mains adapter to pack or lose.

It measures 7.6 cm deep, 16.2 cm wide and 37.7 cm high, so it stands on its edge and occupies a strip of desk about the size of a paperback. The U-path paper feed is what makes that small footprint possible. It takes A4, receipts, ID cards, business cards and photos, and it holds one sheet at a time.

Where does the Brother DS-940DW fall short?

There is no automatic document feeder, so every page is loaded by hand. A 200-page archive is 200 feeds even though the scanning itself is over in about a quarter of an hour, and that is the job a 100-sheet ADF exists to remove.

At 600 dpi optical this is not a photo scanner, and the Canon LiDE 400 resolves 4800 dpi for £74.99 if slides and fine print are the point. The 4.0 from 957 owners is the weakest owner record among the duplex portables here, and the manufacturer warranty runs for a single year, with spare parts kept available for two.

Brother DS-940DW vs DS-740D and WorkForce ES-500WII

The Brother DS-740D costs £139, which is £40.48 less, and it scans the same 15 pages per minute on both sides with no battery and no Wi-Fi. Take the DS-740D if the scanner lives on a desk and the paperwork comes to it; take the DS-940DW when the scanning happens in a client's meeting room or on a train.

The Epson WorkForce ES-500WII costs £375.53, £196.05 more, and it clears 35 ppm through a 100-sheet feeder over Wi-Fi. That is the machine for a stack of paper at one desk, while the Brother is the one for twenty pages collected on the move and sent from a phone.