The Brother DS-640 is a portable scanner that offers fantastic scan quality and reliable optical character recognition at a budget-friendly price. Its features and performance make it perfect for anyone seeking the ability to transport their scanner in a backpack or who wants to be able to hide it away in a drawer in their office once they are done scanning short documents. While this scanner produced some of the highest quality scans in our tests, it lacks a document feeder, and the absence of a single-pass duplex scanning feature makes it a bit cumbersome for digitizing long double-sided documents. If you regularly scan documents larger than ten pages, you may want to invest in a scanner with a feed tray and duplex scanning feature. However, the Brother DS-640 is a fantastic value for occasional use or jobs that require a portable scanner. Check out our scanner review to see how it stacks up versus competing products.
Brother DS-640 Review
Our Verdict
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 This Product
Brother DS-640 | |||||
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| Awards |  Best Budget Portable Scanner |  Best Wireless Portable Scanner | Best Budget Flatbed for Books & Photos | ||
| Price | $135 List Check Price at Amazon | $200 List Check Price at Amazon | $130 List Check Amazon (on sale!) | $160 List Check Amazon (on sale!) | $76 List Check Price at Amazon |
Overall Score  |
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| Star Rating | |||||
| Bottom Line | While not the fastest, it excels in every aspect at a relatively low price | Great performance from a portable scanner that isn't too bad on the wallet | Great performance for infrequent tasks, but not great for large tasks that require auto feeding and higher speeds | While probably sufficient for most, this portable model is not a great option for the home office | This flatbed scanner is ideal for archival-quality photos and the occasional simple document, but impractical for everyday home office use |
| Rating Categories | Brother DS-640 | Epson WorkForce ES-60W | Epson Perfection V39 II | Epson WorkForce ES-50 | Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 |
| Scan Quality (35%) | |||||
| Speed (35%) | |||||
| File Management (20%) | |||||
| Photo Scanning (10%) | |||||
| Specifications | Brother DS-640 | Epson WorkForce ES-60W | Epson Perfection V39 II | Epson WorkForce ES-50 | Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 |
| Two-sided Scanning? | No | No | No | No | No |
| Automatic Document Feeder capacity | No | No | No | No | No |
| Measured Pages Per Minute | 1.4 | 2.2 | 1.8 | 1.6 | 0.7 |
| Connectivity | Micro USB | USB, Wifi | USB | USB | USB |
| Multi-feed Detection | No | No | No | No | No |
| Power Source | USB | USB / Battery | USB | USB | USB |
| Paper Sizes | Max: 8.5" x 72" Min: 2" x 3.4" |
Max: 8.5" x 72" / Min: 2" x 2" | 8.5" x 11.7" | Max: 8.5" x 72" Min: 2" x 2" | 8.5" x 11.7" |
| Optical Resolution | 600 DPI | 600 DPI | 4800 DPI | 600 DPI | 2400 DPI |
| Suggested Daily Volume | 100 scans | 300 scans | not specified | 300 scans | not specified |
| Scanner Type | Sheet-fed | Sheet-fed | Flatbed | Sheet-fed | Flatbed |
Our Analysis and Test Results
The Brother DS-640 delivers quality, portability, and usability in spades, with speed as its only real weak point. Unless you're scanning 10+ page documents daily, the Brother DS-640 will likely offer more than you need at a reasonable price.
Scan Quality
The Brother DS-640 delivers some of the best scan quality per dollar of any model we've tested. It often matches the quality of expensive, large, office-focused models at a fraction of the price.
The PDFs it created looked nearly identical to the originals for general text scans. Even the ink on receipts, which can be problematic for scanners, didn't pose any problem for the DS-640.
The color scans I created in our testing looked fantastic. The colors were accurate and vibrant, and the resolution remained crystal clear. I was more than satisfied with the color documents I scanned with this model.
Scan Speed
The Brother DS-640 isn't particularly fast, but that's because it lacks duplex scanning and a document feeder. However, it's more than serviceable for documents less than ten pages.
In our tests, the Brother DS-640 took 26 seconds to scan a single color page at 600 dpi (a very high resolution). This is a respectable speed, but half of the competing products I tested can scan a page in 20 seconds or less.
Longer, duplex documents are where things slow down. Since you have to manually feed each page into the scanner, scan times for longer documents add up. Additionally, this scanner can only scan one side of a sheet at a time, so double-sided pages must be fed through twice to scan both sides, doubling the time and effort.
In our tests, scanning a 10-page duplex black-and-white document (that's five sheets with text on both sides of each sheet) took 7 minutes and 10 seconds. In comparison, scanners that can scan both sides of a sheet at once can do the same task in under a minute. This time difference isn't terrible if you only scan a few 10-page documents a week, but if that's a regular occurrence, the extra minutes can add up.
File Management
Overall, I liked the software that came with the Brother DS-640. I found its installation and operation to be straightforward and reliable on both Macs and PCs.
Most importantly, the included optical character recognition (OCR) software for both PCs and Macs proved more than capable in our tests. It consistently converted text pages into text-searchable PDFs with no noticeable errors.
The Brother weighs in at just over a pound, can be powered by a USB port, and features smooth paper feeding. It doesn't get much easier than that. It only gets bogged down when scanning longer documents. Unfortunately, the lack of duplex scanning and an automatic document feeder makes scanning long documents a chore.
Photo Scanning
Photo scanning is a strength of the Brother DS-640. While it can't match the quality of the best flatbed scanner we tested, it produced digital copies with exceptional quality, very close to the originals, and outperformed most other non-flatbed scanners. You may not want to feed a treasured old photo through it, but it can get the job done in a pinch.
Should You Buy the Brother DS-640?
The Brother DS-640 is, in our opinion, the perfect solution for those who need high-quality scans but don't tend to scan super long (10+ page) documents all that frequently. If this sounds like you, then I highly recommend making this the newest addition to your home or office workspace.
What Other Scanners Should You Consider?
The Brother DS-640 offers fantastic value for those who only need to scan shorter documents a few times a week, compared with other scanners I tested. You get top-quality results for a fraction of the price of more capable models, all in a small and convenient package. However, if you're consistently scanning 10+ page documents multiple times a week, you'll likely want to upgrade to a model with an automatic document feeder. Depending on your scanning volume, the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 or the Fujitsu Fi-8170 are both great options to consider. Especially if you are using this in a work environment rather than a casual home setting, the extra cost will likely pay for itself in saved time in the long run.
—Sentry Kelly, Michelle Powell, and Max Mutter
