The 3 Best Portable Document Scanners of 2025

The Brother ADS-1350W is the best portable document scanner you can buy. Easy to use and just as quick as (or quicker than) other models, it produces extremely accurate OCR results, and its scans look better than those of the competition.

Brother’s software provides ample control and puts the most important settings at your fingertips. Also, the ADS-1350W’s Wi-Fi connection is stable, and the scanner can work wirelessly with third-party scanning apps such as Windows Scan and Apple’s Image Capture.

Although it lacks a battery, a feature that some other models in this class offer, it can operate via USB power at a slower speed. We think that’s an acceptable trade-off for most people.

We went from unboxing to scanning in about 20 minutes. The process included cutting the box open, removing the scanner from the all-cardboard package, connecting it to a laptop, downloading the software from Brother’s support site, installing the software, running the first page through, and saving the file.

Windows users can install Brother’s iPrint&Scan via the install package downloaded from Brother’s website, while Mac users should look to the App Store. We used Wi-Fi Protected Setup (aka WPS) to establish the Wi-Fi connection, so even though the ADS-1350W has no screen, the process was quick and easy in our tests.

The software provides ample control. Brother’s software puts the ADS-1350W’s most important settings at your fingertips — in contrast to the software from other manufacturers, which often makes you tunnel through submenus to select basic things such as document size, color or black and white, resolution, or duplexing. Once the machine scans the document, you can rearrange pages in the preview screen before saving, and you can save multiple times in different formats without having to rescan.

If you’re an Apple devotee and want to use macOS’s built-in Image Capture app instead, note that the ADS-1350W worked seamlessly and exhibited equally fast scanning in our tests with that software when scanning via USB.

It scans quickly. In our experience, whether scanning via a USB-C connection or over Wi-Fi, the ADS-1350W took 45 seconds to scan 20 single-sided test pages, which works out to 27 pages per minute. By comparison, the previous version of this scanner, Brother’s ADS-1250W, chugged along at 25 ppm.

Strangely, when we used macOS’s Image Capture, Wi-Fi scanning with the ADS-1350W slowed to 14.5 ppm. As a result, we suggest using iPrint&Scan for wireless scanning.

The scans look great. Image quality from the ADS-1350W was cleaner than what we got out of the other document scanners we tested. It did the best job of correcting skew and cropping out dark edges, and its text looked sharp but natural.

Generally speaking, the ADS-1350W produced very similar results to what you’d get from a typical all-in-one printer’s document feeder or flatbed scanner.

Its OCR results are very accurate. When we scanned challenging mixed-format documents such as an IRS 1099 form at 300 dpi, this scanner missed only a couple of words in very small fonts (squiggly ones, in particular) on darker backgrounds. Line breaks, especially on multicolumn documents such as the 1099 form, are a problem for any scanner, but the ADS-1350W handled them as well as any other model we’ve tested.

On our descending-font document, the ADS-1350W was accurate 100% of the time at 6 points and larger with both serif and sans serif fonts, regardless of the scanning resolution. Its accuracy dropped off with 4-point type but stayed above 90% at 300 dpi and above 98% at 600 dpi.

The ADS-1350W was more accurate than other scanners we tested at almost every font size, in both font styles, and at both resolutions (though the differences were not huge).

Its photo scans also look good, but a flatbed scanner remains a better choice for that. When scanning our glossy test photo, the ADS-1350W produced acceptably crisp results with accurate color and contrast. However, the rollers that pull sheets through the scanner can easily scratch the coating on glossy and matte photo paper and cause the paper to curl, which essentially ruins the originals.

A dedicated photo scanner such as our upgrade pick produces far better results and won’t damage your prints. If you already own an all-in-one printer and only occasionally have photos to scan, the flatbed scanner on that machine is likely to produce comparable photo scans and won’t scratch the finish.

You can scan straight to a USB thumb drive. The USB-A port on the back of the ADS-1350W lets you scan directly to a USB stick. A button on top of the scanner allows you to do so without using the app, or you can go into the app and select the USB drive as the destination for the file.

If you need additional scan-to options, such as FTP and network folders, consider the otherwise similar Brother ADS-1800W.

You can power the scanner via a computer USB port or a portable power pack. We had no problems and saw no slowdown when powering the ADS-1350W using an old ZMI PowerPack 20K Pro (discontinued) we had lying around. As long as you use a USB-C power bank that puts out more than 15 W, the ADS-1350W should be able to scan just fine.

If you load it properly, it scans wonderfully. Although the ADS-1350W can handle everything from copy paper to heavy card stock and plastic IDs, it will jam if you don’t load your documents in exactly the right way.

A sticker on the document feeder shows how to do it: Fan the sheets so that the first page goes deepest in the feed slot and the last page is farthest out, and then gently slide the stack into the slot. It takes a bit of experimentation, but once you have the feel, your jam rate will drop to almost zero. All of the scanners we tested were just as picky, so this issue isn’t limited to the ADS-1350W.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It’s slightly bigger and heavier than the other scanners we tested. At 11.8 by 4.1 by 3.3 inches and 3 pounds, the ADS-1350W is about the size of a footlong sub sandwich and the weight of an old-school MacBook Air. But that’s an acceptable trade-off considering all the things this Brother scanner does well. If you place a much higher value on portability, you might want to consider other alternatives.

It lacks a built-in battery and doesn’t always come with an AC adapter. But it can run on the near-ubiquitous USB-C power that you probably have on hand to charge your phone or maybe your laptop. We ran this scanner on power adapters for iPhones, Google Pixel phones, and a MacBook Pro, as well as on a USB-C connection to a laptop that was both plugged in and unplugged and running off its own battery power, and all of those methods worked as long as the phone adapters output at least 15 W. In the box, Brother includes a USB-C cable certified for 5 Gbps and 60 W.

The mobile app is limited to non-searchable PDFs and JPEGs. The app can’t do OCR, which is also true of competitors’ apps, and it caps resolution at 300 dpi. You can use PC software later to perform OCR on the scans that you capture through the app, but we’d prefer to see Brother and other manufacturers build this functionality into their apps.

Brother’s iPrint&Scan software can’t save a Microsoft Word DOC file. Although the ADS-1350W produces more accurate OCR results than the competition, Brother iPrint&Scan can export those results only as TXT and RTF files, searchable PDFs, or non-searchable images. Some scanners can also export Microsoft Word DOC files with more advanced formatting. However, this is a minor complaint — especially since the formatting in OCR-produced DOC files usually needs so much cleanup that it’s almost easier to paste in the plain text and format it from scratch.