Brother DS700D

Brother DS-700D

The Brother DS-700D ($200 street) is the least expensive portable scanner we've seen that can scan both sides of a page at once. This ability to duplex may be enough by itself to make the scanner worth considering, particularly if you're on a tight budget. Unfortunately, like the Brother DS-600 ($149.99 direct, 2.5 stars) that I reviewed last year, the DS-700D suffers from limitations in the software it comes with, particularly for scanning and recognizing text with multipage documents. These limitations make the scanner less of a value than it might seem at first, unless you already own the software you need. The DS-700D comes with the same program as the DS-600 for document management and optical character recognition (OCR), NewSoft Presto! PageManager. As I discussed in the DS-600 review, scanning a multipage document to PageManager puts each page in its own file. You can then recognize the text, and send the multiple pages to a single searchable PDF file. However, if you send the pages to Word, each page goes into a separate file. If you don't need to edit text after scanning it, don't need to scan multipage files, or if you already have another program that can handle the conversion more adroitly, this won't be a problem.