Brother DS-640 Compact Mobile Document Scanner

The Brother DS-640 scanner offers portability, excellent scan quality and reliable optical character recognition at an affordable price. Its features and performance make it perfect for anyone who wants to transport the scanner in a backpack or wants to be able to hide it in an office drawer once they're done scanning short documents. The DS-640 offers the convenience of plug-and-play. Use your laptop or PC to power the DS-640 by connecting the included micro USB 3.0 cable. The same connection allows you to seamlessly scan hardcopy documents directly to your computer.

Brother DS-640 Reviews

The perfect balance between performance, quality and portability at an affordable price

Compact, Lightweight, and Simple

Measuring 1.5 x 2.0 x 11.9 inches (HWD) and weighing just over 1 pound, the DS-640 is the smallest and lightest of the three Brother DSmobile models mentioned here. However, in terms of compactness and lightness, Epson's similarly priced (same as the DS-640) DS-70 portable document scanner is still slightly smaller and weighs about half the weight of this least expensive DSmobile model. Epson supports automatic duplex scanning, which the DS-640 also does not support. In other words, to scan a duplex page, you must run it twice on the device.

Scanning Performance

The Brother DS-640 has the best scan quality per dollar of any model we've tested. It usually matches the quality of large, expensive office models at a fraction of the price

The PDFs we created looked almost identical to the originals scanned from regular text. Even though ink on receipts can be a problem for scanners, it was not a problem for the DS-640.

Brother DS-640 Scanner - Despite its relatively low price, the Brother ds-640 produces some ... Despite its relatively low price, the Brother DS-640 produced some of the best looking scans in our tests.

Speed

The Brother DS-640 isn't particularly fast, but that's because it has neither duplex scanning nor a document feeder. It is, however, very useful for documents of less than ten pages.

In our tests, the Brother DS-640 took 30 seconds to scan monochrome pages at 600 dpi (very high resolution), slightly higher than the average of 24 seconds for all models tested.

Longer duplex documents are where things get a little slower. Scanning time for longer documents increases because you must manually feed each page into the scanner. In addition, this scanner can only scan one side of a sheet of paper at a time, so you must feed the duplex pages twice to scan both sides, doubling the time and effort you put in.

Business card archiving software

The software package for the DS-640 is the same as that for the DS-740D. You get the standard TWAIN and WIA drivers for scanning to programs that support direct scanning, as well as the latest ICA drivers for Windows and SANE drivers for Mac. The bundle also includes Nuance PaperPort SE with OCR, Power PDF, Brother's iPrint&Scan for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, and Presto PageManager with OCR for Mac. supported cloud sites are Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and OneDrive are supported.

PaperPort SE provides the scanner interface and basic document management, and Power PDF lets you create and edit PDFs. iPrint&Scan is Brother's cross-platform driver, and Presto PageManager provides similar functionality to PaperPort SE, but for macOS.

Like the DS-740D, this bundle does not include a business card scanning and archiving program, which is a common feature of portable scanners. To get this feature, you must upgrade to the DSmobile DS-940DW, which comes with Presto BizCard and BR-Receipts for scanning and archiving financial documents

Main Features

Save time with fast scanning speeds： Scans color and black-and-white documents at up to 16 ppm.

Scan on the go： Power the Brother DS-640 document scanner to a laptop or PC via the included micro USB 3.0 cable, allowing scanning from virtually anywhere and making the DS-640 highly portable for mobile professionals.

Compatible with the way you work： The software included with the DS-640 document scanner allows you to scan to multiple "scan-to" destinations, including documents, images, OCR, email, and cloud services to keep your business running smoothly.

Bundled software lets you do even more： The included software suite provides document management and OCR software that allows you to convert hard copy documents into editable Microsoft Word files.

Small and lightweight： With a sleek new design, this Brother document scanner is less than 11.8 inches long and weighs about 1.5 pounds, so it's easy to take with you wherever you go.

Handles a wide range of document sizes： The Brother DS-640 document scanner lets you scan a variety of documents, including invoices and receipts, up to 72 inches long on paper weighing up to 72 pounds.

Scan plastic ID cards and business cards： Easily scan business cards and plastic ID cards by holding them in the same position as other documents.

Optimize images and text for storage/sorting： The software included with the Brother DS-640 document scanner enhances scanning with automatic color detection/adjustment, image rotation (PC only), color bleed prevention, background removal, text enhancement and chromatic aberration.

Flexible business process/system support： Supports Windows, Mac® and Linux® environments and TWAIN/WIA for PC/ICA for Mac/SANE drivers.

Bottom Line

The affordable Brother DSmobile DS-640 scans quickly and accurately, but lacks one-way duplex scanning, making it an occasional model for frugal shoppers.