The Brother ADS-1250W is a valuable tool for anyone who works from a home office. Here are a few reasons why it is essential for home offices: 1. It is a compact and portable scanner that is perfect for small home offices. It is small and lightweight, making it easy to take with you wherever you go. This means that you can scan documents and other materials while on the go, without having to be tethered to a computer or other device. 2. It offers high-quality scanning performance. The Brother ADS-1250W has a maximum optical resolution of 1200 x 2400 dpi, which allows you to scan items in incredible detail. This means that you can scan important documents and other materials without losing any of the fine details. 3. It is easy to use. The Brother ADS-1250W has a simple and intuitive interface that allows you to scan items quickly and easily. This means that you can focus on your work and get more done, without having to spend a lot of time learning how to use the scanner. 4. It is versatile. The Brother ADS-1250W can scan a wide range of materials, including documents, photos, receipts, and even plastic cards. This means that you can use it to scan everything you need, without having to worry about compatibility issues. Overall, the Brother ADS-1250W is an essential tool for anyone who works from a home office. It is compact, portable, easy to use, and offers high-quality scanning performance. If you need a way to scan documents and other materials quickly and easily, the Brother ADS-1250W is definitely worth considering.

UPDATE: I would buy the Epson if I could do it over. I waited too long to return this one. Not only is it difficult to set up, it is hard to get the pages set into the feeder straight so they get pulled in at an angle a lot of times. Now, there is a "skew auto correction" that will correct a lot of this, but sometimes the page still is skewed after scanned. You just don't feel like you ever get the pages set good when you put them into the feeder. Also, the little paper guides that you adjust to the size of your paper are hard to control. When you close them in on your paper to stabilize it, it pushes the paper around and skews it more. First Review: The instructions on this are miserable. They say quick start-up, but they don't work. You will probably need the special usb cable (not the regular one) to set it up and it does not come with the product. The quick start- up refers you to the on line manual for help, and it doesn't say a thing about how to connect the device. So, if you want to buy this, buy the cable first, else prepare to be frustrated! I'll write another review once I get it set up and start using it.

For my needs, it is the best scanner I ever had (and I have used quite a few.) I am moving and I have tons of papers, so I decided to destroy them but to digitize many of them. In a few days I scanned lots of documents and various papers like medical, banking stuff, tax returns, technical papers, etc.. The result is organized in multiple folders and amounts to 1.27 GB which represents a lot of data. This little scanner is optimized for this type of utilization, of course I would not use it to scan and copy photographic material. It is really small, very easy to use and it interface is extremely well done. A feature I like, is that I could select PDF output and the result is a readable PDF document, the OCR is done automatically. Of course I also appreciate the wireless capability, one less wire and flexibility of placement. If you use it at 300x300 dpi its scanning speed is very fast, and when I compared the output with 600x600 dpi, which is slower, there was no significant difference in quality. I am used to traditional flat scanners but this one is so much painless to use that I am really impressed, and of course it is quite inexpensive. I strongly recommend it.

Worked well, except spent hours and hours trying to use it wireless, to no avail. Brother’s tech support finally told me to buy a cable. It is an odd cable; stores did not carry it but I was able to pirate one from a backup disk drive.

For the price, I would have assumed that the documents would straighten themselves through the software automatically. I'd have to hold the paper/receipts steady to make sure they scan straight. I use the scan to USB feature a lot, so I don't know if the scans come out straight or crooked until I view them on a computer. Wifi setup is such a pain if you've changed your wireless network in any form, either a name change or password change. Wifi scanning was nice while it lasted. Now that I changed my wifi password, it doesn't work anymore and I have no idea how to set it back up. So I'm using the scan to USB feature now. I think those two points are a negative enough to take a star off for each.

I've wanted a scanner that will feed more than one page at a time and doesn't take the time and effort of a flatbed. The Brother Wireless Portable Compact Desktop Scanner ADS-1250W is everything I wanted it to be - easy to set up, super compact (I can use it anywhere and am not tethered to a bulky machine), efficient and does a great job. I'm trying to reduce the papers I have filed - things I don't need physical copies of, but should probably have access to. After sorting, say, the medical or utility bills from last year, I can scan 20 pages at a time and the PDFs come out great. I appreciate the ability to add additional pages, save with whatever settings I want, and wherever I want. I did have a couple of issues with really long papers (like end of year social security statements for my mom) but I just scanned these one side at a time and added them to that year's tax file easily. It's speedy, accurate and easy to use and control. Highly recommended.

My experience in trying to get the wifi setup to work: Bad setup guide leads to bad website leads to bad manual leads to support team which is not available on weekends. Can't even shake good results out of Google. Special USB Micro-B cord can hardwire it, but not included and not the most common cord type, so nope can't even get to the scanning part yet. This scanner's supposed to make my life easier, not turn it into a multi-day setup easter-egg hunt. Decided to return it, but return window has passed, so I'm stuck with it. Unless I throw it out an actual window. I'll contact support when, you know, they're ready, and throw some good time after bad. Whichever VP at Brother who starved the setup-experience team of resources to get the most basic things right should go do something else for a living. I remember my last Brother product fighting with me a lot before I replaced it with an HP one (where setup went great), but based on the Wirecutter recommendation gave the Brother brand another go. Last time. And I guess I gotta take Wirecutter recs with more of a grain of salt from here on out.

We use this in the office. Compact, convenient, sturdy. Very happy with it. I've always had good luck with Brother products.

This scanner claims to be a WiFi device. I could not get it to join any WiFi network, which meant I can't use it with a phone. It only worked when connected directly to a PC or Mac by a USB cable. I returned it and got the touch-screen version instead (Brother ADS-1700W). It was well worth the extra money for something that works without fighting it.

Before I get into this, I want to mention that I scan documents regularly and my go-to in the home/home-office setting is the ScanSnap iX500, which is a heavier duty unit in a totally different category. If you don't need portability and you can justify the expense (at this point, the ScanSnaps are over $600: ouch), then definitely go with the ScanSnap, because it is the best document scanner I have used in the last decade. Also, as another disclaimer, I want to mention that my first one of these arrived, new, in the box, with a DOA wi-fi antenna. I spent more than a few minutes troubleshooting/diagnosing it and, while the RMA process was painless, it sucks to get a DOA product. All of that said, the Brother ADS-1250w is a highly portable document scanner that performs minimally, both in terms of quality and reliability. If your use case is scanning one or two pages at a time while on the road or in the cafe and you're not looking for super high quality, then yes, as most other reviews point out, this is the scanner for you. If, however, you are going to be scanning contracts, manuscripts or anything that is more than a few pages -OR- if you have non-trivial quality or performance requirements, my advice would be to bite the bullet, sacrifice some portability and look at larger, less-portable scanners. Trying to scan larger documents wirelessly on this device will result in a lot of wasted time and effort: - wi-fi "direct" connectivity is dodgy and there is often several seconds of lag between hitting "scan" in the app and the start of the scan. - on a related note, the odds of a job dying and taking the scanner down with it are pretty good: I scanned a dozen pages just now and two of my pages just died, requiring restart the whole scanner (neither the Stop button nor opening the top lid worked to reset the machine: womp womp). - due to its ultra-portable form factor, the odds of documents can get wrinkled/bent going through the scanner (requiring re-scans) are good and, ultimately, you're going to be scanning the same page a few times. - the proprietary Brother phone app required for scanning to phone kind of sucks on both Android and iOS (which is impressive, because most apps suck on one platform or the other and not both) and you will struggle with it on either platform: whoever designed the workflow of the app is manifestly unfamiliar with UI patterns on mobile devices. tl;dr The ultra-portable form factor is impressive, but this scanner just isn't a.) reliable or b.) a very good scanner. It's hard to recommend this to anyone, especially someone who needs performance in a professional, on-the-road setting.