Hi, I've just received my new portable document scanner it's a brother DS-740D
and I'm just about to unbox it and see what's in it
OK, USB cable
instruction books
packaging and
the scanner
Nice and simple and compact which is exactly what I wanted
There's the USB port. That's interesting, it's some keying on the end of the cable.
It's not a standard USB connector. And as you can see plug this into there and the other end
into a computer which i'll do next. On my computer I visit the website
support.brother.com/windows and click on the document scanner icon.
The DS-740D is a basic scanner so scroll to the bottom of the list and click on the DS-740D
icon. The "Read before downloading" notes indicate that you must be logged on as admin
and also that you should disconnect your scanner if you have already connected it.
I've jumped the gun so I disconnected my scanner. When the download has completed run the installer.
I speeded up this installation - a lot! You can now reconnect your scanner.
I speeded up the download and installation again. When I saw this, I initially thought that these
were free applications bundled with the scanner software. I downloaded and installed Power PDF
and then I saw this message about a trial and purchase. I didn't even try it. I immediately
uninstalled it. I have no idea how much it is but I have all the PDF functionality that I require
from the free version of PDF-Xchange Editor. You can register your scanner on the brother
website after you have set up an account. I've done this but I haven't included it in the video.
The user guides icon jumps to a useful web page with some useful documentation for your scanner.
The most important link in this window is the iPrint&Scan icon. This app will check and see
what Brother devices are connected to your PC. Brother obviously hope you own multiple
of their devices but in my case I only own the DS-740D scanner. Click on its icon and OK
and this will select the scanner. Click the scan icon and you can do your first scan.
You can change document size, the colour settings and the resolution. If you click on
the "All settings" button you open a window with all the global settings. The scanning
settings will allow the scanned document to be corrected or enhanced by the software.
The feed control settings allow you to merge multiple documents into a single PDF.
However, I could not get this to work with the DS-740D.
I think this is only for more advanced scanners in the Brother range.
I actually don't use this Brother software because there is a donationware PDF scanner
called NAPS2 - this stands for "Not Another PDF Scanner 2" - that provides significantly more
functionality than the supplied Brother scanner software. I'm going to do a video on NAPS2
and will place a link at the top of this video when the video has been published on YouTube.
However, let's have a look at the functionality that this Brother scanner software gives you.
Insert a sheet in the scanner
you will feel the scanner gently grab the sheet when the paper has been loaded
into the scanner correctly. Then click "Scan". The scanner is capable of scanning both sides of
the paper at the same time. The scanned images of both sides of the sheet of paper are shown.
I want to save the scan document to my PC. I think that most of the time you will want to
save the scans as PDFs - occasionally as JPEG images - but I'll be showing saving as a PDF.
If it is a document that you are scanning then it is extremely useful to be able to
search for text within a PDF document so I would always click on searchable PDF.
After you have set up the folder where you want to save the PDF click on save.
I have now opened the scan document in my PDF reader. Obviously the scanned PDF looks
identical to the original document but if you hit control+f to open the find window you can
search for text. So, if I type "May" the various occurrences of the word "May" are highlighted.
One thing to note though, if you type a partial word like "elec" then it will not find the word
"electricity". I've now typed "electricity" in the find window and as you can see the word
"electricity" has been highlighted in several places in the document.
I hope you found this review of the Brother scanner DS-740D useful. Thank you.