Brother DS-740D Duplex Compact Mobile Document Scanner

Use for work on the go, super easy, user friendly, works way better than I expected it to.

This is a nice little duplex scanner. I bought the factory refurbished model, and for a quick minute I thought that might have been a mistake. After every page, the scanner took 20+ seconds to be ready again. I'm using Linux (Fedora), so I thought maybe it was a driver problem. Or maybe I got a dud unit. I watched the udev monitor and realized the scanner seemed to be power-cycling after each page. Odd. Turns out, it was the port on my laptop. I plugged it into a different USB port ON THE SAME LAPTOP and the scanner works great! No long delay between scanning subsequent pages. No strange udev messages. Linux folks, Brother has Linux drives on their product support website (*.deb and *.rpm). Install is simple. I used Gnome's "Document Scanner" at first as the scanning front end. You have to select "All Pages From Feeder" (not "Single Page") in order for the two-sided (duplex) functionality of the 740D to work. You MUST ALSO select "Both" from the preferences dialogue. I eventually switched to "gscan2pdf", which is more flexible in terms of scan post-processing. In the "Scan" dialogue on the "Scan Options" tab, the "Scan Source" option allows you to perform two-sided (duplex) scanning. Select the option ending with "left aligned" for single-sided and "left aligned - duplex" for two-sided.

Scanning multiple pages is a pain. The settings aren't configured so that it is a quick 1-click option. Also calibration always fails. Tech support was no help for the second problem and the first they only kind of fixed with a software update. It does work now and I like the power pdf software that a license is free with the purchase.

This is a great little printer. I was looking for a portable printer that didn’t rely on thermal paper and this is what popped up in my research. Although it’s a tad heavy if I had to take it with me every day. It’s still doable. It is a bit bigger than I had hoped, it’s still substantially smaller than most other printers unless you go to a thermal printer which I didn’t want to do. I have a bigger color Brother printer, so I was already familiar with the quality of their products. And this one lives up to their high quality standards. It holds a good amount of paper, so I don’t have to keep feeding it all the time. It does use toner cartridges instead of ink cartridges, so they are bigger. But once you walk through the steps of changing a cartridge, it’s quite easy. Overall, I’m happy with this purchase. It’s a great product at a great price and the quality is solid. I recommend this little workhorse.

I ordered it because I wanted to have scanning capacity on my desk. I have automated scanner/printer from the same company for serious scanning jobs. Well as time passes by - this small tiny scanner is so convenient that I use it for almost anything except really big stacks of paper (that I do not have that often). so it became my primary scanner. Scan quality is sufficient for me and scanning speed is pretty fast. I am not using it for imaging/photography work, just regular scanning of documents and occasional images, whatever comes to my desk. Great product

“Great scanner! Easy to set up, fast, and the scans come out very clear. Perfect for home and office use. Definitely worth it.

I decided to replace the Neat scanner that I have used to scan on the order of ten thousand receipts and documents over the last 7 years and thought the Brother DS-740D would be perfect. It is far from perfect. When it works it is fast and can do both sides in one scan. Unfortunately, it rarely works without jamming (jams on about 75% of scans, even on a perfect 8.5x11 document). I have read every support page on the issue of jamming and none of the advice helped. I have ordered the special carrier sheets that are supposed to help ($19 + $6 S&H + tax for two sheets that are only good for 500 scans each), but I am not optimistic. For anyone that claims I am doing it wrong: my Neat scanner never jammed, not even once in almost 10,000 scans and I am doing the exact same types of scan with the new Brother scanner. Even worse: it is not really jammed when it claims to be. The paper is not wrinkled up in the scanner or going in or out at an angle, or anything like that. It just stops and claims to be jammed, sometimes at the beginning, or the middle, or near the end. I tried changing settings to fix this issue, but that only seemed to help once, when I used TWAIN and long/narrow size for a long receipt. Jamming is not the only issue. It also has a very short USB cable (~ 30 inches) with one uncommon end so that you probably can’t replace it with a longer cable that you already have. The cord barely reaches to the top or back of my computer when it is right next to it. I would have to rearrange my entire desk/computer setup to place the scanner in a position that makes scanning easier. If they had included a six-foot cable, then this would not be an issue. Another issue is the terrible BR-Receipts software. It does not automatically recognize anything. My 7-year-old Neat scanner software got 90% of the information on receipts right on the first try (vendor, date, payment type, tax, total) and often got 100% of the info right on well-designed clear receipts. Keep in mind this is the original stand-alone Neat 5.x software, not the on-line supported version that you have to pay for continuously. Brother makes you teach their software by dragging boxes around the image, but the tiny boxes cannot be resized to fit and are split into two sections that cannot be moved past each other. One section contains vendor and date, the other contains payment type, tax, total. If the vendor’s name is in a lager font, then the box won’t capture it and you will have to type it yourself. If the date is at the bottom instead of the top, then you must type it in yourself. Neither section goes all the way to the top or bottom of the image, so you will have to type any info that is near the edges. Extremely disappointed. I have used Brother products across many decades. I think my first brother product was an electronic thermal printer or typewriter in the 1980s and my newest before this scanner is an all-in-one printer / flatbed scanner that we are still using.

The quality of the scans are good and the footprint is small. The set up is not intuitive as there are 3 separate files that need to be downloaded (for a Mac) and the instructions aren't obvious. Now that it's set up, the workflow is strange and a bit cumbersome. To scan a multi-page document, you need to open the iPrint app first, choose PDF, choose where you want to save it and then hit the SCAN icon in the app (NOT THE START BUTTON ON THE SCANNER). Any other workflow results in a JPEG in which each page is a separate document and you then need to go into Finder, find the the files and rename them- but they will still stay as separate documents. Very stupid design for a duplex scanner and for one that has a start button on the machine and for one that has a nice sounding "Workflow" option that doesn't let you set up the most obvious and likely to use workflow option I can imagine. And... I only learned all of this by spending 30 minutes on chat with a very helpful Brother support person. There are NO instructions that I could find on line to figure this out, including the ones the support person sent me to. I'm not going to return this as it's already on my desk and I've put in the time to figure this out. Not sure how others are using this scanner but in 2022, I'd think that any decent UX designer would have done a better job than this.