Review: Brother ADS-2000

I decided to try for a paperless office a couple of years back. The idea is to scan everything that comes in the mail, OCR it making it searchable, and then shredding or discarding the mail. You can do this with a flat-bed scanner, but you'd die of boredom feeding the thing one sheet at a time. The correct solution is a high speed sheet-fed scanner. We chose the Brother ADS2000.

The device is compact, about the size of a fax machine. It comes with a few accessories but we almost never used them. I've successfully dumped about 100 pages at a time into the ADS2000, and the scanner can do them at very high speed. The machine came with a ton of software, but I lost the disk pretty early on, so I pretty much only scan using my copy of Adobe Acrobat, which does the OCR after scanning, albeit at a slow, single-threaded pace.

The machine does jam, especially if the documents you feed it are old or pressed together hard because they got stuck together for one reason or another. But by and large, the machine works, and my son has abused it a lot but it still keeps on ticking. If you're dedicated to going paperless, I'd definitely recommend the Brother ADS2000.