The Best Portable Document Scanner (2025)

I’m a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering photography gear, printers, and scanners, and I have been testing all of those things professionally for 20 years. I also maintain our guides to mirrorless cameras and photo printers, and I’ve written about photographing birds, eclipses, fireworks, and more.

For this guide:

• Wirecutter has logged more than 175 hours researching and testing dozens of scanners since we first started covering portable document scanners in 2013.
• I scoured forums, pored over owner reviews, and searched out people’s experiences with portable scanners to see how they use the devices and what’s important to them.
• Supervising editor Ben Keough and senior updates writer Arriana Vasquez wrote previous versions of this guide, and some of their picks, test results, and writing remain in this version.

Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

If you have a big pile of documents and receipts that you need to digitize, these scanners offer the quickest way to get the job done. But you might want one for other reasons, too. Here’s what a good portable document scanner can do for you:

• Reduces clutter: This may be the digital age, but a frustrating variety of documents still come exclusively on paper, and you need to keep many of them for years according to state and federal laws. Creating digital copies allows you to stay in compliance without drowning in a sea of paper.
• Makes documents easier to find: Since portable document scanners use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to turn printed text into searchable text, you can perform word searches to find the exact document you need in seconds. That’s a lot better than spending an afternoon digging through dusty filing cabinets.
• Scans are harder to misplace than paper: Even if you’re diligent about sorting and filing your receipts and tax forms, there’s always the chance that you’ll inadvertently toss something out during a move or spring cleaning. It’s a lot harder to accidentally discard digital copies, especially when you’ve backed them up to a cloud storage account.
• Easy to stow away: You probably won’t scan every day, which is why it’s great that these machines are designed to fold down into an even more compact profile for storage and travel. Stationary desktop scanners are faster, but they take up more space on a desk, and you can’t easily toss them in a drawer until the next time you need them.

If you already own a portable document scanner and like it well enough, you probably have little reason to upgrade. Scanner development moves at a snail’s pace, and models often stay on shelves for as many as four or five years between revisions. That said, if your current scanner doesn’t offer Wi-Fi connectivity, can’t scan both sides of a document at once, scans significantly slower than you’d like, or doesn’t reliably recognize text, give our picks a look.

If you have an all-in-one printer with a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder, you should think about buying a portable document scanner only if you find that you often need to scan when you’re away from home. Portable document scanners aren’t more accurate than all-in-one machines and don’t produce noticeably better OCR results.

Technically, yes, a phone works for scans. But depending on the lighting conditions or the kind of document you’re scanning, a portable document scanner can produce higher-quality scans more consistently.

We have picks for the best Android and iOS scanning apps, and they’re great for quickly capturing medical forms and travel receipts, but we don’t recommend using them for large, frequent jobs or tasks where perfect character recognition is required.

Portable document scanners are simple devices: They scan documents and deliver digital files. But there are a few boxes they need to check in order to be worth your time and money, so we prioritize the following qualities when surveying the available models.

• Usability: If you hate using your scanner, you won’t use it. The hardware interface needs to be easy to navigate, and the desktop and mobile software should be powerful enough to meet your needs but not so complex that it gets in your way when you’re working under pressure.
• OCR: A good portable document scanner should be able to accurately recognize printed text via optical character recognition, or OCR, and turn it into a searchable PDF. The best portable document scanners can also export the text as an editable document, either in DOC, RTF, or TXT format. Ideally, a good scanner accurately recognizes every character, but realistically we expect a success rate above 90%.
• Wi-Fi: Just a few years ago, Wi-Fi connectivity was rare in portable document scanners. Today it’s commonplace. Being able to run your scanner without a USB cable is a nice perk, especially if the wireless scanning speed isn’t any slower.
• Duplex scanning: Scanning both sides of a two-sided document in a single pass drastically reduces the amount of time it takes to scan large documents. The feature also reduces wear and tear on both the original documents and the scanner itself.
• Automatic document feeder: Speaking of large documents, you shouldn’t have to stand there and feed your scanner dozens of pages one by one. With an automatic document feeder (ADF), you can slide the whole stack into a slot and let the machine work its magic.
• Portability: It’s right there in the name. Portable document scanners span a broad range of sizes and, especially, weights—from under 1 pound to well over 3 pounds. Although machines with ADFs tend to be on the heftier side, we think a feeder is an important enough feature to make the extra weight worth tolerating. Any model around 3 pounds or less is okay in our book.
• Speed: The best portable document scanners operate at around the same speed—about 25 pages per minute—but all else being equal, we prefer a faster model.
• Diverse power options: The fewer accessories you need to carry with your scanner, the more portable it is. Most scanners today can run on either USB or a typical AC adapter, so if you want to travel light, all you need is a USB cable. Some include built-in batteries so that they can operate in a truly wireless fashion: no USB cable, no power brick, not even a laptop. That’s certainly a nice feature to have, but one that most laptop owners can do without.

With the above features in mind, we considered the full range of portable document scanners currently available from top brands such as Brother, Canon, Doxie, Epson, Fujitsu, Visioneer, and Xerox, immediately ruling out bulky desktop models that didn’t collapse for storage and transport.

Once we had a list of likely candidates, we tested the scanners to assess the following:

• Setup difficulty: We determined how hard it was to get each scanner up and running, and how long setup took.
• Software quality: We evaluated whether the included software was easy and intuitive to use.
• OCR reliability: We scanned an IRS 1099 tax form (PDF) and a simple text document with the same sentence repeated in descending font size from 12 points to 4, saving the files as searchable PDFs and (if possible) editable text files and then checking them for accuracy.
• Image quality: We scanned a star chart designed for lens-sharpness testing, a document from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) meant to mimic a typical office report, and a couple of photos printed on regular copy paper as 300 dpi files and compared the results with the originals, as well as the output of the flatbed scanner in our all-in-one printer pick.
• Speed: We ran a 20-sheet double-sided business document through each scanner using both simplex and duplex modes, over both USB and Wi-Fi, and at both 300 dpi and 600 dpi resolution. In each case, we recorded how long the scan job took to complete, from our pressing the Scan button until the results were ready to be saved.
• Wi-Fi stability: We noted how reliable each model’s Wi-Fi connection was throughout the testing period, and whether any hiccups in reconnecting occurred after we powered the scanner down and back up again.
• Powering options: We checked to see what effect, if any, arose from our powering each scanner with a portable power bank, a direct USB connection to a laptop, or a power adapter (if one was included).

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 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.

The Brother DS-940DW has all of the features we consider most desirable in an ultraportable scanner, including Wi-Fi connectivity, duplex scanning, a built-in battery, and the ability to save scans to an SD card.

It’s a bit slower than our main pick, though, so it’s really best only if you need a particularly small scanner that has a built-in battery. And keep in mind that it can scan only one page at a time, which will slow you down in comparison with scanners that have an automatic document feeder.

You don’t need to use an app. A small screen on the right side gives you the option to change certain settings such as PDF versus JPEG output or simplex versus duplex scanning. These settings are available only when you’re scanning to an SD card, though. If you're scanning to a computer or a mobile device, you can make those changes in the appropriate software.

It scans quickly. Of the ultraportable scanners we tested, the DS-940DW was one of the fastest (tied with the Epson ES-60W). It scanned one-sided documents to a computer in 0.6 second and both sides (which the Epson model cannot do) in 0.8 second.

When we connected the DS-940DW to the iPrint&Scan app on mobile, its duplex scan speeds were surprisingly faster, ready for viewing in 0.7 second (single-sided scans remained at 0.6 second).

It now uses the same iPrint&Scan app as our top pick. With this model, Brother used to include its DSMobileCapture software, which we found nearly unusable. Now that the company has swapped out the software, we’ve found iPrint&Scan much better.

In our tests, Wi-Fi was easy to use on this model. A WPS button makes it simple to set up a secure wireless connection; you simply press a button on the scanner and then one on your router.

On the left side of the scanner is a switch that you can slide to choose between using Wi-Fi, USB, or an SD card.

If you want a document scanner that can also handle photos without destroying them, the Epson FastFoto FF-680W is the best choice. Unlike our top pick, this model doesn’t bend photos as they pass through the scanner, and it doesn’t leave scratches and other unsightly marks on the originals.

However, at 11.7 by 6.7 by 6.9 inches and 8.2 pounds, it’s much less portable (and much more expensive) than our top pick, so we recommend it only if you have a large number of photos that need scanning.

It’s extremely fast for a photo scanner. It can produce high-resolution photo scans at a rate of about 1.5 seconds per shot and can scan a wide variety of sizes, including Polaroid pictures.

It’s a versatile photo-archive machine. With its automatic feeder, the FF-680W can handle batches of up to 36 photos, and it accepts photos ranging from wallet-size to 5 by 7 inches. If you feed them one at a time, it can also handle 8-by-10-inch shots and up to 8.5-by-36-inch panoramas. In addition, it captures the handwritten notes on the back of photos in a single pass.

Epson’s FastFoto software both scans and organizes your photos. You can tag each batch with descriptive text and the time period in which the photos were taken, and the app then uses the info to create a template for the file names.

It can also auto-populate subfolders for each time period, apply automatic image enhancement, and scan back-side notes (saving the second file with a “b” at the end of the name and grouping the fronts and backs together in the app).

You can save your images uncompressed. You can save images as either lossy JPEGs or uncompressed TIFF files, but you have to choose before you scan—you can’t save to both formats in a single pass.

It can also scan documents. The FF-680W is a very capable document scanner. In our tests it was much faster than our top pick, chewing through a 20-page two-sided office document in just 29 seconds via USB, or a rate of around 41.5 pages per minute. Its document feeder can handle an impressive 100 sheets of copy paper. That said, we still think our top pick’s portability makes that model a better choice if you don’t need to scan photos.

You can save straight to the cloud. Since everybody lives in the cloud now, the FastFoto app can automatically upload new scans to popular storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

Installation is simple. Using the installer from Epson’s support site, we had no issues getting our test unit onto our office Wi-Fi network, and the USB connection was flawless on both Windows and Mac.

It’s kind of pricey. Typically priced around $600, the FF-680W doesn’t offer its considerable firepower on the cheap. If you don’t have a huge number of photos and don’t expect to produce more in the future, using a photo-scanning service to archive your memories would probably be more economical. Our numbers suggest that you would need to scan about 1,500 photos to make owning the FF-680W a better value than outsourcing.

If our pick is unavailable, or if you really want a touchscreen or direct-to-cloud scanning: Get the Brother ADS-1800W. This model is virtually identical to the ADS-1350W, uses the same software, produces the same scan quality, generates the same OCR results, and scans at the same speed. It also has a 2.8-inch resistive touchscreen (meaning you have to press hard to get it to recognize touches), and it lets you scan directly to the cloud, FTP or email servers, or network drives, as well as your phone, your computer, and USB thumb drives.

We decided not to name it as a pick since it typically costs a bit more than the ADS-1350W, and the extras probably aren’t worth the investment for most people. But if they speak to you, or if the ADS-1350W is out of stock, go for it.

If you want faster scans and don’t mind slightly washed out colors (or if you only scan in black and white): You might consider the ScanSnap iX1300. At 11.7 by 4.5 by 3.4-inches and 4.4 pounds, it’s just a little larger and almost 1.5 pounds heavier than our top pick, which we already call out for being on the large side for a portable scanner. But in our tests it was also up to 17% faster than our top pick depending on scanning mode, the Brother ADS-1350W, and consistently outpaced that scanner whether scanning via USB or Wi-Fi, single-sided or duplex.

We weren’t thrilled by its less-saturated colors and the fact that it doesn’t include ICA/TWAIN drivers, so you won’t be able to use it with the included Image Capture software on Macs. We do like the ScanSnap software you’re forced to use, but we wish it listed dpi numbers in its scan quality settings rather than using arbitrary “normal,” “better,” “best,” and “excellent” labels. Ultimately, we think our top pick’s slightly better image quality and lower (by about $20) typical price make it the better option for most people.

This is not a comprehensive list of all portable document scanners we’ve considered. We have removed any models that are discontinued or no longer meet our criteria.

The Canon ImageFormula R10 is one of the smallest scanners we tested, but it lacks all the features that would make it truly portable, such as Wi-Fi connectivity, the ability to save to an SD card, or a rechargeable battery.

The Canon ImageFormula P-215II is slower and less accurate than our top pick and doesn’t offer Wi-Fi. Theoretically you can buy a separate Wi-Fi adapter and battery-pack dongle at the eye-popping price of $170, but it’s out of stock everywhere and brings the total cost of the machine to near $400, which is just outrageous.

The ScanSnap iX1600 is both larger (11.5 by 6.3 by 6-inches) and heavier (7.5 pounds) than we think most people will want in a “portable” scanner. Like the iX1300, it can scan faster than the Brother ADS-1350W, but we don’t think that speed will make your aching back feel better after you’ve carried it across town in a shoulder bag. Plus, it typically costs at least $150 more than the Brother and doesn’t include ICA/TWAIN drivers, so you’re limited to using the provided ScanSnap software.

We considered but didn’t test the Visioneer Patriot P15 andXerox XDS-P, which are identical scanners sold under different brand names. They lack Wi-Fi support, claim a scan speed of just 15 pages per minute (in contrast to 25 ppm for our pick), and are slightly bigger than the ADS-1350W, yet they cost more.

Ultraportable scanners

The Brother DS-640 and DS-740D don’t have Wi-Fi connectivity and can’t save scans to an SD card. Both are pretty slow, averaging about 10 seconds for one page, and they can’t perform duplex scanning.

The Epson WorkForce ES-50 was the smallest, lightest scanner we tested. Similar to the Brother DS-640, however, the ES-50 doesn’t have any of the key features we look for, such as duplex scanning, Wi-Fi, or a rechargeable battery.

Although the Epson WorkForce ES-60W does have most of the features we look for, including a rechargeable battery and Wi-Fi support, I found the connection to be finicky, and its Wi-Fi signal didn’t always show up on my phone. This model also can’t do duplex scanning or save to an SD card.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.