Although Brother has a long history of building scanners into its multifunction printers, the ImageCenter ADS-2000 SEE IT is the company's first foray into the desktop single-function scanner arena. It offers good OCR capabilities and some nifty features—such as the ability to scan to USB thumb drives— for a scanner in its price range. In our testing, it proved somewhat sluggish, particularly at default scan settings, for its rated speed.

The ADS-2000 is a duplex scanner with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). It measures 11.8 by 8.7 inches (WD) when closed, and weighs 7.7 pounds. It has a straight-through paper path from the ADF into the output tray. It supports the scanning of business cards as well as plastic cards.

As is the case with most document scanners, the ADS-2000's optical resolution is up to 600 ppi. The default resolution for scanning to file (PDF) is 300 ppi, which should be more than enough for most business documents.

View All 5 Photos in Gallery

An uncommon feature of the ADS-2000 is the ability to scan to USB keys, as well as to Android phones (though only over a cable). Other interesting features are 2-in-1 scanning (stitching 2 documents together into a ledger-sized scanned document) and continuous scanning (the ability to scan documents longer than the ADF's 50-page maximum).

It also has multi-feed detection, for catching when more than one page is fed through the scanner at once and stopping the scan so you can re-feed the unscanned sheet(s). This is a good thing to have, especially as in my testing the scanner had a relatively high number of misfeeds—I had to scuttle several test runs because of them.

Software
Software bundled with the ADS-2000 includes Brother's Control Center 4 scan utility; Nuance Paper Port 12SE (for Windows) and Presto! PageManager 9 (for Mac) for document management and optical character recognition (OCR); Presto! BizCard 5; and Nuance PDF Converter Professional 7 (for Windows), which lets you create, edit, search, and collaborate on PDF files, and send them to Cloud-based services. It also has Twain and ISIS drivers, which let you scan from virtually any program that has a scan command. All of the programs are installed automatically during setup except BizCard and Nuance PDF converter, which although they're on the same disc as the other programs, you have to select and install them separately.

The Control Center scan utility is a simple and quite useful interface, with buttons for 4 scan destinations: Scan to Image (300 ppi JPEG); OCR (300 ppi .txt file), Email (200 ppi PDF); and File (300 ppi PDF). By right-clicking on any of the buttons, you can change the settings, such as resolution, scan type (auto black and white, gray (error diffusion), true gray, or 24-bit color), document size, simplex/duplex, and set brightness and contrast.

You can also initiate scans from Nuance PaperPort (or Presto! PageManager if you use the scanner with a Mac), which lets you scan to multiple destinations, displayed at the bottom of the screen with icons. The Twain and ISIS drivers let you scan to nearly any program that has a scan command.  

Speed and Document Management
The ADS-2000 is rated at up to 24 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) scanning and 24 ppm/48 images per minute (ipm) for duplex scanning, in which each side of a two-sided document counts as one image. In my testing, using the scan utility's default settings to scan to file (color image PDF at 300 ppi), it averaged 1 minute 22 seconds or 18.4 ppm, to scan and save a 25-page file, a bit under its rated speed. For duplex scanning, its tested speed fell to 12.2 ppm or 24.4 ipm. In scanning to searchable PDF format, the ADS-2000 scanned our test document in simplex at 12.9 ppm; for duplex, it slowed to 8.8 ppm/17.6 ipm. I also scanned the test document to a text file using the scan utility's OCR button; it did so at 13 ppm.

We do our official timings using default settings, as we've found that users tend to stick to them. But I also tried scanning the same document to image PDF at 200 ppi; the ADS-2000 turned in a similar 18.7 ppm simplex speed but a faster 18.7 ppm/37.4 ppm for duplex scanning, losing no time in scanning two-sided sheets. For searchable PDFs, it scanned at the same speed as at 300 ppi (12.9 ppm), but in duplex scanning it was a bit faster (14.1 ppm/28.2 ipm) than at the default resolution, and even a tad faster than its simplex scanning speed.

The bottom line is that although simplex scanning speeds were much the same at either 200 or 300 ppi, you may gain a little speed in duplex scanning by switching to 200 ppi. This comes at the expense of resolution, though there wasn't any obvious degradation in quality at 200 ppi in the PDFs I examined. (The higher resolution is more important with older or faded documents.) Curiously, when I tried scanning to black-and-white as well as grayscale PDFs (both image and searchable), these scans actually took longer than scanning to color.

I timed my scans from when I hit the scan button until the saved PDF of the scan showed up in its folder in Windows Explorer. However, I noticed that on occasion—particularly when scanning in duplex—the scanner would take additional time in "processing" (so the on-screen message said) before it was ready to scan another document. This could be an issue for people scanning multiple two-sided or multi-page documents.

We clocked the Editors' Choice Canon ImageFormula DR-C125, rated at 25 ppm/50 ipm, at 25.4 ppm and 50 ipm for simplex and duplex scanning, respectively, to image PDF, true to its rated speed. Impressively, it maintained the same speeds when scanning to searchable PDF. I recently timed the Plustek SmartOffice PS286 Plus, rated at 25 ppm for simplex and 50 ipm for duplex scanning, at 23 ppm and 37.2 ipm for simplex and duplex respectively, when scanning to image PDF, and at 13 ppm in scanning in simplex to searchable PDF.

The ADS-2000 did well at OCR, reading our Arial and Times New Roman text documents perfectly down to 8-point type. For business card management with BizCard 5, it did a reasonable job, entering data in the correct fields without an error on about half my test cards, and on most of the others had no more than two or three errors.

The Brother ADS-2000 is a good addition to Brother's repertoire as the company's first single-function desktop scanner—It has incorporated scanners into its multifunction printers for many years, and in the past two years has introduced portable scanners such as the Brother DS-700D ($200 street, 2.5 stars). The ADS-2000 has a good feature set for a moderately priced desktop scanner—many more expensive units can't scan to USB thumb drives—and it did well in our OCR testing. It is somewhat sluggish for its rated speed, particularly at default scan settings, and even took some extra processing time after some scans were saved to file before it was ready to initiate a new scan. The Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C125 not only matched its rated speed for both simplex and duplex scanning, it lost no time in scanning to searchable PDF.

More Scanner Reviews:

•   Epson DS-410 Document Scanner
•   Epson DS-320 Portable Duplex Document Scanner With ADF
•   HP ScanJet Enterprise Flow N9120 fn2 Document Scanner
•   Epson WorkForce DS-770 Color Document Scanner
•   Panasonic KV-S1026C-MKII
•  more