Brother DS-640 Scanner: In-Depth Review and User Opinions

The Brother DS-640 is a compact and portable document scanner designed for home and small office use. This versatile scanner can handle scanning, organizing, and sharing various types of documents with ease.

The DS-640 model offers fast duplex scanning at speeds up to 25 pages per minute in both color and black and white. It can scan single or double sided documents up to 8.5" x 34" in size through its 50-page capacity auto document feeder. The scanner has a daily duty cycle of up to 1,500 scanned pages.

With its compact footprint of 11.4 x 3.7 x 3.3 inches and weighing just 3.97 lbs, the DS-640 delivers robust scanning technology in a portable form factor. This makes it convenient for use in home offices, dorm rooms, and other small workspaces.

The DS-640 provides an affordable scanning solution while still offering useful tools for organizing paperwork and streamlining workflows. Its decent scan quality, easy connectivity options, and included document management software pack useful functionality into an easy-to-use device.

Design

The Brother DS-640 is a compact desktop document scanner that will fit nicely into any home or small office. It measures 11.7 x 3.7 x 3.2 inches (WxDxH) and weighs just 2.2 lbs, making it easy to set up on your desk without taking up too much space.

Despite its small footprint, the DS-640 has a generous document feeder that can hold up to 20 pages at a time. Pages should be standard letter or legal size.

The scanner itself is available in either black or white housing to match your decor. Both color options feature a minimalist design with rounded corners and angled sides. The lid opens vertically allowing you to see scanned documents ejecting out the back. Overall the look is clean, modern, and unobtrusive.

Scanning Technology

The Brother DS-640 desktop document scanner utilizes advanced scanning technology to digitize documents quickly and accurately. It has an optical scanning resolution of up to 600 x 600 dpi, allowing it to capture fine details and produce high quality scans.

For scanning speeds, the DS-640 can scan up to 25 pages per minute in black and white, grayscale or color at resolutions up to 300 dpi. This makes it suitable for medium to high volume scanning jobs. Scanning is a swift process with the DS-640, especially for single page documents.

The scanner can reliably handle a variety of document types too including ID cards, receipts, photos and documents up to 8.5” x 34” in size. Its straight paper path design ensures papers do not bend or wrinkle during scanning. The fed documents are scanned on both sides in a single pass for efficient duplex scanning.

Connectivity

The Brother DS-640 offers both wired and wireless connectivity options for scanning documents. For wired connectivity, the scanner has a high-speed USB 2.0 interface that connects directly to your computer. This allows for fast and reliable data transfers when scanning larger documents or batches of papers.

For wireless connectivity, the DS-640 is Wi-Fi enabled using 802.11b/g/n standards. You can connect the scanner to your existing wireless network and scan documents to shared folders or cloud services. The scanner supports WEP 64/128, WPA-PSK (TKIP/AES), and WPA2-PSK (TKIP/AES) security protocols to keep your network protected. Wireless setup is easy with the Brother installer application that will walk you through the network configuration.

The scanner does not offer any direct mobile connectivity options like Bluetooth. However, you can scan to mobile devices or upload scanned files to the cloud for mobile access using the wireless network connection. Overall, the wired and wireless capabilities provide flexible connectivity choices to integrate the scanner into your existing setup.

Scan Settings

The Brother DS-640 offers versatile scan settings to optimize your workflow. You can scan documents directly to popular file formats like JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PDF, and Word or Excel files. The scanner supports scanning at up to 600 x 600 dpi for crisp, high-quality scans.

For document management, the auto deskew feature straightens any crooked pages fed through the scanner. Auto crop and blank page removal help reduce file sizes by omitting unnecessary borders and blank pages from the final scan. You can also set custom crop areas to isolate the content you want.

Scans are adjustable from letter size up to legal size. The scanner can handle pages between 2.75 x 2.13 inches up to 8.5 x 38.6 inches in size. This flexibility allows you to digitize magazines, small photos, or extra long pages without hassle.

Ease of Use

The Brother DS-640 scanner is designed to be very easy to use, with simple buttons and an automatic document feeder.

• The control panel on the front of the scanner has only a few buttons for power, start, and cancel. There are also LED indicator lights that display the scanner status. The minimal buttons make the scanner intuitive to operate.

• The automatic document feeder can hold up to 20 pages and handles paper sizes up to 8.5" x 34". Simply load the pages in the feeder and press the start button, and the DS-640 will quickly scan each page one after another without any further interaction needed.

• For software, the DS-640 comes with Brother's Control Center software that allows you to configure scan settings and initiate scans from your computer. The software has a simple interface for selecting scan options and file formats. Once configured, you can press a button to start scanning directly from the computer.

• Overall, the straightforward buttons on the scanner itself plus the easy-to-use software make the DS-640 a very user-friendly option for document scanning and digitization. The auto feeder and ability to scan from the computer help speed up workflow.

Extra Features

The Brother DS-640 comes with several useful extra features that improve the scanning experience. One handy feature is the automatic document feeder (ADF) which can hold up to 20 pages. Simply load your pages into the ADF and the DS-640 will scan them one by one without any further effort on your part. This makes scanning multi-page documents much easier compared to a flatbed scanner.

Another useful capability is business card scanning. The DS-640 has a dedicated business card slot that allows you to scan business cards and save the contact details directly into applications like Outlook. No more manually entering business card information!

Additionally, the scanner has plastic card slots that enable you to scan plastic cards such as ID cards, membership cards, and insurance cards. The slots ensure the cards are scanned straight and captures the details accurately. This comes in handy for digitizing all kinds of cards for archival or sharing purposes.

In summary, the automatic document feeder, business card scanning, and plastic card slots are valuable extra features that boost the functionality of the Brother DS-640 scanner. These extras make it easier and quicker to scan all kinds of documents beyond just single sheets of paper.

Document Management

The Brother DS-640 comes with several useful document management features.

Included software

The scanner includes Brother's own scanning software, Brother iPrint&Scan. This allows you to easily scan documents and save them as PDFs or JPEGs directly to your computer or connected cloud services. It has a simple interface that makes it easy to adjust settings before scanning.

OCR

The DS-640 also includes integrated OCR (optical character recognition) technology. This allows you to scan documents and convert them into searchable and editable text files like Word docs or Excel spreadsheets. The OCR works quickly and is fairly accurate at recognizing text.

Organizing scans

Within the Brother software, you can create folders to organize your scans by client, project, or other categories that make sense for your needs. The software also allows you to rename files based on date, custom names, or data from barcode sheets. This makes it simple to scan and digitize large amounts of paperwork while keeping it organized.

Overall, the document management capabilities of the DS-640 allow both efficient scanning and effective organization of digitized files. For managing and accessing paperwork electronically, the included software is a major plus for this desktop scanner.

Pros

• Fast duplex scanning up to 25 pages per minute in both color and monochrome. The scanner can scan a significant stack of documents quickly.

• Produces high quality scans with resolutions up to 600 x 600 dpi optical and 1200 x 1200 dpi interpolated. The scanning sensor accurately captures fine details and small text.

• Includes useful software like Brother Control Center for easy scan configuration and Nuance PaperPort SE for organizing scanned documents. These programs enhance the functionality.

• Compact size takes up minimal space. The scanner has a small footprint of 11.4 x 3.9 inches, making it easy to setup in tight areas.

Cons

• The scanner's small feeder capacity of 20 pages means you'll have to refill it frequently for larger scanning jobs. This can disrupt workflow and be tedious.

• There have been some complaints about misfeeds and paper jams when scanning thicker documents like file folders. The auto feed sensor seems easily confused.

• The lack of an onboard LCD display panel forces you to rely on your computer screen to check settings and status. Having a display on the scanner itself would be more convenient.

• The Brother scanner software is not the most intuitive or user-friendly. It takes some learning and getting used to in order to figure out all the features and customizations.