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This assessment first appeared in difficulty 346 of PC Pro.
Sitting on the rung beneath Brother’s flagship ADS-4900W scanner, the ADS-4700W gives a extra reasonably priced various to SMBs on tight budgets. It might value over £200 lower than its larger brother however nonetheless delivers a formidable package deal with a high scan velocity of 40ppm, a hefty 6,000-page every day obligation cycle and a barely smaller 80-page ADF.
It’s nicely linked, too, providing USB 3, wired or wi-fi entry, although for the latter it helps solely 2.4GHz networks (not 802.11a/n 5GHz just like the ADS-4900W). There are not any compromises with the person interface, although: the identical slick 10.9cm colour LCD touchscreen gives a wealth of user-friendly scan options.
Set up takes round half-hour per PC, with Brother’s downloadable utility getting you began by loading the drivers, iPrint&Scan app and firmware replace software. It additionally provides Brother’s Utilities app, which you employ to obtain and set up Nuance’s PaperPort 14 SE digital file cupboard and Kofax’s Energy PDF 3 OCR and doc conversion software.
The ADS-4700W might be remotely managed by way of its internet browser console and you may monitor it and all different networked Brother units with the free BRAdmin 4 SNMP-based software program. Cell customers additionally get in on the scanning act; the free Cell Join iOS and Android apps remotely connect with the scanner, pull in scans and supply to avoid wasting them regionally or e-mail them as JPEGs and PDFs.
Brother offers one of the best cloud assist because the ADS-4700W can ship paperwork on to SharePoint On-line, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneNote, Evernote and Field accounts. They’re easy to arrange from Brother’s Internet Join portal, the place we registered our Dropbox account, entered the distinctive 11-digit code on the scanner’s touchscreen and PIN-protected native entry.
Stroll-up scan options are excellent. Paperwork might be despatched on to any networked PC that has Brother’s software program put in simply by deciding on them from the touchscreen. The scanner’s internet console can be utilized to create as much as 25 profiles for scans to FTP and SharePoint websites, e-mail servers and community shares, with every vacation spot showing within the touchscreen.
The touchscreen lets you create as much as 56 scan shortcuts grouped underneath six customized tabs. Allow the setting lock characteristic within the internet console and shortcut entry can then be restricted by requiring a username and PIN.
The iPrint&Scan app streamlines desktop scanning with one-touch workflows that outline native, cloud, e-mail or different apps as locations. Add settings equivalent to a decision and searchable PDF (sPDF) output and you may register them with the scanner so they seem in its touchscreen workflow menu listed underneath the host’s title for simple choice.
Our checks confirmed the ADS-4700W was barely sooner than the quoted speeds, with duplex greyscale and colour scans of fifty financial institution statements at 200 and 300dpi delivering between 44 and 46ppm. We selected sPDF for our output format and needed to wait two minutes after every scan had completed for the iPrint&Scan OCR service to transform them.
Transferring to 600dpi noticed speeds drop to 11.6ppm, however you received’t want this for normal doc archiving as scans at 200dpi produce good-quality, correct sPDFs. Paper dealing with is impeccable, too, with the scanner dealing with our stacks of statements, flimsy courier tear-offs and until receipts with none jams.
The ADS-4700W is a effective selection for small companies, with a formidable vary of scanning options at an reasonably priced value. Efficiency is sweet, output high quality can’t be faulted and the versatile LCD touchscreen menus present nice walk-up scan companies.