Brother ADS-3100 High-Speed Desktop Scanner Review – PCMag
Straight-up document scanning, basic connectivity
I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
Brother's entry-level ADS-3100 is a capable sheetfed document scanner that's a good value for home, hybrid, or small offices and workgroups.
At the bottom of the pecking order in Brother’s recent release of a wave of sheetfed desktop document scanners, its ADS-3100 High-Speed Desktop Scanner ($329.99) is relatively fast and reliably accurate. It lists for about $40 less than the next model up, the ADS-3300W, but you give up quite a lot for the savings: network connectivity, a touch-screen control panel, and support for smartphones and other handheld devices, to name a few convenience and productivity features. That’s not to say, however, that small or home offices that plug the ADS-3100 into a solitary computer’s USB port (or scan directly to a USB flash, solid-state, or hard drive) won’t get good value from this scanner. Competition among entry-level and mid-volume document scanners is formidable, but if your business doesn’t demand networkability or wireless scanning, this Brother model should serve you well.
The ADS-3100 is the last of five new sheetfed document scanners from Brother to reach our test bench. The ADS-4900W is the high-volume flagship (and an Editors’ Choice award winner), and the midrange ADS-4700W, ADS-4300N, and ADS-3300W are excellent as well. They are all the same size. The five Brothers measure 7.5 by 11.7 by 8.5 inches (HWD) with their paper trays closed—like most scanners in this category, they double or triple their desktop footprint with trays extended for use—and weigh 6.2 to 6.5 pounds each.
This scanner has too many direct competitors to list here, so we’ll name just four key ones: the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1400, the Epson WorkForce ES-400 II, the Raven Select Document Scanner, and the Canon imageFormula R50 Office Docment Scanner. The ADS-3100 falls short of some rivals by lacking a color touch screen. Its control panel holds only four buttons (Power, Stop/Cancel, Scan to USB, Scan to PC) and a few LED status indicators. This and the ADS-4300N are the only members of the new Brother quintet to lack touch screens.
You can scan to a variety of PDF types (high-compression, image, searchable, secure, or signed), as well as PDF/A, single-page and multipage TIFF, BMP, plain text, and Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. The scanner’s maximum resolution is 600 dots per inch (1,200dpi interpolated), and it supports document sizes ranging from 2 inches square to 8.5 inches wide by 16.4 feet long, with 24-bit color depth.
Online scanning destinations include cloud and social media sites and FTP sites, as well as local drives and email. It’s easy to access most social media and cloud sites, though the ADS-3100 is preconfigured to support Google Drive, OneDrive, Evernote, Box, Dropbox, OneNote, SharePoint Online, and Expensify.
The ADS-3100 features a 60-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending single- and double-sided multipage documents to the scanner. Brother rates its daily duty cycle at 6,000 scans. These specs match the ADS-4300N’s; the ADS-4700W has a larger 80-page ADF, while the more robust ADS-4900W combines a 100-sheet feeder and 9,000-scan daily duty cycle.
These specs are more or less average among low-end document scanners. The Raven Select, Epson ES-400 II, and ScanSnap iX1400 all have 50-sheet ADFs, while the Canon R50’s holds 60 sheets. The Fujitsu has the same 6,000-scan duty rating as the Brother; the Epson and Canon are rated for 4,000 and the Raven for only 2,000 daily scans.
Of the five new Brother document scanners, the ADS-3100 is the only one without a wired or wireless network interface—its sole connectivity option, apart from the USB Type-A port around back for scanning directly to storage devices, is a USB 3.0 (or 2.0) cable. That leaves out smartphones and tablets.
The software bundle doesn’t reflect this printer’s lower-end status, though. It includes Brother iPrint&Scan (desktop) for Windows and Mac, Brother ScanEssentials Lite for Windows, Kofax Power PDF for Windows, Presto! BizCard for Windows and Mac, Image Folio Processing Software for Windows, and Kofax PaperPort SE with OCR for Windows.
iPrint&Scan is an all-in-one printer interface that’s also compatible with Brother’s single-function scanners and printers. It lets you create and manage workflow profiles that you can choose with the front-panel buttons.
ScanEssentials Lite, meanwhile, is a trimmed-down version of another Brother scanner interface that’s also a document-management and financial-data archiving application. Kofax PaperPort also combines a scanner interface with document-management features, among them its own optical character recognition (OCR), workflow profiles, and automated naming conventions.
Presto! BizCard is what it sounds like, a business-card-scanning and contact-archiving program, and Image Folio is an image-capturing program designed to help you scan, edit, enhance, and print photos. You also get four third-party drivers—TWAIN, WIA, ISIS, and Sane—for scanning directly into many compatible applications, such as Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop and the Microsoft 365 suite.
Like its siblings (barring the flagship ADS-4900W), the ADS-3100 is rated at 40 one-sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) and 80 two-sided (duplex) images per minute (ipm, where each page side is counted as an image). I put those speed figures to the test using iPrint&Scan over a USB connection to our Intel Core i5 testbed running Windows 10 Pro. (I also ran a few tests with some of the other apps and got similar results, though scanning to USB flash drives is notably faster; see more about how we test scanners.)
First, I clocked the ADS-3100 as it scanned our standard one-sided 25-page and two-sided 25-page (50 sides) documents and then converted and saved them as image PDF files. The scanner managed 41.6ppm and 81.3ipm, barely beating its ratings. The competitors mentioned here did similarly, with the ADS-4900W being faster (68.7ppm and 125.4ipm) and the Epson ES-400 II being slower (37.7ppm and 66.7ipm).
Next, I timed the Brother as it scanned our two-sided, 25-page hard-copy document and saved it to the more versatile searchable PDF format. The ADS-3100 finished the job in 38 seconds, on the high side of average. The ADS-4900W and the HP ScanJet Pro N4000 snw1 took 34 seconds and 24 seconds respectively, while the Canon R50 took 37 seconds. The Fujitsu made it in 40 seconds, versus 41 for the Raven Select and 44 for the Epson. Frankly, unless you spend most of your day scanning stacks of lengthy documents, these scores should be fast enough for most offices.
Besides, how well a scanner reads text is more important than how quickly it does so. Most document scanners today can convert printed text to searchable PDF format with no errors down to 5 or 6 points. The Brother ADS-3100 was perfectly average, managing scans down to 6-point type problem-free in both our Arial and Times New Roman font tests. Of the other machines discussed here, only the Canon R50 yielded a different result: down to 5 points for Arial, and 6 points for Times New Roman. You’re not likely to encounter text smaller than 10 points in most real-world business documents.
I also scanned a few stacks of business cards into Presto! BizCard, with predictable results: The software does a fine job of digitizing text and figures and putting them into the proper fields in a contacts database (or exporting them to Outlook, Gmail, and other contact management or personal information manager apps). Finally, to see how well the Brother handled images, I scanned several photos to Image Folio. Most were well-detailed, with bright and accurate colors, showing the ADS-3100 can serve as a decent sheetfed photo scanner or alternative to the Epson FastFoto FF-680W and Canon imageFormula RS40. If you have a shoebox of photos stashed under the bed or on a closet shelf, the Image Folio software should deliver additional value.
If you can live without networked or mobile scanning, the Brother ADS-3100 may be right for you, especially if you also have a bunch of photos to archive (though it’s more of a document than a photo scanner). Without wireless or Ethernet connectivity, however, it’s really more of a personal machine for relatively low scanning volumes, around a few hundred per day. (You’d have to fill its 60-sheet ADF 100 times per day, or 14 times per hour, to reach its 6,000-scan limit.) Under the right conditions, though, the ADS-3100 is without question a fine entry-level-to-midrange document scanner.
Brother's entry-level ADS-3100 is a capable sheetfed document scanner that's a good value for home, hybrid, or small offices and workgroups.
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Advertisement
I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years I have also written for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. I also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com (now Lifewire).
Read William’s full bio
Advertisement
PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering lab-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
PCMag supports Group Black and its mission to increase greater diversity in media voices and media ownerships.
© 1996-2022 Ziff Davis, LLC., a Ziff Davis company. All Rights Reserved.
PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant.
