Best ever

I use this scanner at work. Most of my scans are of the end of day accounting which are emailed to our head office.This machine allows me to put in all different sizes. Eg A4 balance sheet along with all the card machine slips. It will scan them all at the same time, both sides if needed but it works that out for itself, it will them email them all as 1 file or separate files all with the press of a button.This scanner has saved me 30 minutes a day so will basically pay for itself in weeks and therefore it makes this scanner one of the cheapest on the market.A nice feature is the ability to edit the PDF documents so if you forget a PO number you can enter it on the PDF scan. It is a small but important feature for me.

Looking to update my current scanner (ScanSnap iX500) which I have had for a number of years, but instead of staying with the same manufacturer, I went with an alternative which I have heard good things about.The Raven Pro Document Scanner is a very different scanner and so far has surpassed my expectations.Easy to set up.Wifi (2GHz and 5GHz) + Wired.large Control panel with an easy-to-follow interface.Not so bulky Software to install.Good quality Scans.Easy to configure the destination of scans (cloud + local)I could go on all day with the Pros the only downside is you can't fold it closed which is not a problem for me really for such a good scanner.

I was starting to run out of storage space for my paperwork at home, so after doing some research I decided to buy this scanner as it seemed to meet my needs due to the fact that I no longer have a home computer. It is an absolute god send. I am not very savy when it comes to tech but it was easy to set up, and I very quickly completed my first task of scanning all my old statements. I am using the free raven cloud for storage and it was very easy to create and name folders. I have not used all the functions of the scanner yet, but so far it has been very easy to navigate.I will be working my way through the rest of household paperwork this week and look forward to have a lot less paperwork filed in my cabinet.

Unfortunately, this scanner is far from what the manufacturer promises! The scanner operating system moves very hard. It scans quickly but it takes an eternity to process and send the documents even if the settings are set to the minimum and in black and white (without removing the white page, without automatic orientation, without ocr, etc.) It does not know how to scan a blue stamp in black and white! On the MAC, every time the computer is restarted, the scanner must be installed again, and very often it takes several minutes to connect. For certain areas of the world, it does not know how to show the time and date on the screen! The scan to fax feature is only available for the US. The support team just brags about helping you but doesn't offer any solutions! It is the weakest scanner compared to five others I have. To be able to use the scanner, you must have an account on the manufacturer's website. Why????? no other manufacturer has anything like this!!!

Hopefully, this review is not premature. I will update this review in the future if any of the main points I have raised fundamentally change.I took delivery of the Raven Scanner Pro on August 29th, 2019. I assume you are looking for a scanner of similar feature set which brought you to this review. I, too, was looking at this scanner, and before I wrote this, I found just three reviews on Amazon and one partial review on YouTube, which was more of an unboxing video. I think that video did more damage to my purchase than any review I have read on Amazon.This scanner is a little more expensive than the Fujitsu iX1500, which I consider being the gold standard of document scanners. I have this scanner and have purchased three other Fujitsu scanners before that scanner. When I want a document scanner, my first choice has been Fujitsu and for good reasons.This scanner gave me pause. It did so because of a feature I saw which is that the scanner has no required software for a personal computer. That was enough to catch my attention. Each time I buy a document scanner, I have to make sure it will work with my Apple Macintosh. Most times, the manufacturer provides software and drivers but not always. In the earlier days of the Fujitsu, for example, there were specific versions for the Mac and PC. If I switched to the PC, my Mac scanner would not work. Newer scanners, like the iX1500, have drivers for both, and this problem is all gone for me. Gone, but not forgotten.One reviewer mentioned that he wanted to use this scanner with a Chromebook and a ChromeBox. That is not possible because scanners need drivers and software, which is not how the Chromebook works. The same issue is coming up with the rise of the smartphone and tablet. I have both the iPhone and the iPad Pro, and honestly, those are fast becoming my platform of choice. Sometimes the hardware has an app in the Apple AppStore that allows its use from your iPhone or iPad using a feature such as AirPrint. Printers that use AirPrint are more valuable to me than those who lack AirPrint as a result. I do like to be able to print from the iPhone or iPad.From what I understand, this scanner uses Android to be both the client and the scanner in a single device. And as such, it can scan your document to itself, and then upload the document to your cloud providers, such as DropBox or others. I am a fan of DropBox, so that's where my scans are now going.Unlike any other scanner you have used, this scanner has a large display, and on that display, you choose how to scan and where the scan will go. Your personal computer such as a Mac or PC or your smartphone or your tablet has nothing to do with it. The scanner scans documents super fast, and then sends those documents directly to the cloud. If your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC have access to the cloud such as DropBox, then you can collect your scanned document there. It is this feature that I wanted. The real question is, what is that feature worth in terms of money or other issues raised by other reviewers.The unboxing video on YouTube mentioned that the scanner is noisy. Noisy? I wasn't even sure what that meant. Scanners are not loud. According to the unboxing video, the scanner has a noisy fan. I hate the noise. I buy Macs most of the time because they tend to be quiet. I don't think I want a noisy scanner. But I wanted a scanner that takes the pain of drivers and software out of the equation. And since Amazon says this can be returned for a full refund, I decided to try it.So first I will answer this question. Is this scanner noisy? I do hear the fan as my room is nice and quiet. In an office setting, I doubt you hear it at all. The scanner goes to sleep by itself, and when it does, it is silent. If you are done scanning, press the power button and the blue light behind the power button blinks. I will assume that means the device is sleeping the same as if you stopped using it for some time. Thus it is silent again. I don't think it is excessively loud when on and I am a stickler for these things. The Fujitsu is always quiet. The Raven is the first scanner I ever had with a fan inside it. Of course I wish it were silent, but believe me, it's not at all something to worry about.Is it true you don't need drivers? Yup. I did nothing at all on my Mac. Keep in mind this means you don't use your computer to scan. You use the scanner to scan. There is no scanner app on the Mac or PC that you use with this scanner. The scanner scans to itself and then sends the output to the cloud. To me, this means I never have to worry about the scanner working on my computer. You do, however, have to have a wifi network or an Ethernet network. In this regard, it differs from every other scanner I have ever used.Quality and speed. Okay, this is the hallmark of the Fujitsu. If you have never used a ScanSnap the feature everyone loves so much is you put a stack of paper in the feed, and it rips through them, single-sided or double-sided in record time. This scanner wants me to say single-sided or double-sided before I scan. The Fujitsu does it automatically, and that's not always a good thing. If I write on a piece of binder paper, there will be blue lines and a red margin line on both sides. But I typically want one side. Through the software on the Fujitsu, you can change it on the fly to single or double, but leave the preference to whichever you prefer. On the Raven, there are four large squares on the large display. Side, Color, Quality, and Destination. They stay stuck to what you last used. Super simple to change from single to double-sided anytime you want right on the scanner. This is a feature, not a bug unless you have 50 sheets and some are double, and some are single. In that case, it would be better if it had an AUTO choice. It does not. You either scan single, or double. In my specific use-case, I do not mind this, but I can see others seeing this as a problem. Raven should seriously consider an improvement here.As for speed, it feels like Fujitsu to me. The speed does not disappoint. Single or double, the scan is lighting fast.There is built-in software that allows you to crop and rotate and make other changes, like naming the scanned document. And then you can email it. Unfortunately, the email function lacks, in my opinion. I expected that if I typed in one email address and sent a document there, and then another email address and sent another document there, that it might remember the two addresses and give me a choice on the third scanned document. Nope. It only retains that last email address. I am not going to memorize email addresses on my own, so this feature is not useful enough to be useful to me. Another area for future improvement, I hope.So is it perfect? No. It needs an AUTO feature for single or double-sided documents. It could use a quieter fan but believe me. It isn't a problem. The email address feature could be better. It could retain multiple addresses else I think the only time I will use it is to email myself.All that said, this is a cloud scanner and doesn't require a personal computer to set up, or use. You can take it out of the box, and set it up and start using it to send documents to the cloud or an email address. Once in the cloud, like DropBox, you have access to it and can do all the things you might do from your client. So it doesn't come with free software for your PC or Mac.Today is what I call the honeymoon period. I use my scanner every single day. I scan handwritten text to a shared folder and my teacher, and I mark it up, and we discuss it. I'm a bit of a language learner, and this is a simple way for me to interface with my teacher as she lives on the other side of the earth. I read and write on an ordinary pad and scan that to a folder. She adds comments, sometimes live via skype and sometimes as homework. I also scan tons of documents which I sent to clients and store in a file system. I have been buying document scanners for years. I believe this is my second one in just a few months and my fifth or sixth one overall. If you need a document scanner, you'll know it. They are not for everyone. As my iPad Pro becomes my machine of choice, a document scanner such as this becomes more of a necessity than a desire. I think this is the first step, and I will bet many more like it will become the norm in the coming years. Unless something dramatic happens in the next few weeks, I'm keeping it.Update - 2019-09-09 -It has been more than a week since I started using the Raven Pro and I wanted to post a small update to the original thoughts I posted here.1. This scanner has grown on me. I still have a recently purchased Fujitsu iX1500 scanner on my desk at my office. And I have the Raven Pro at home. I use document scanners daily, as I previously mentioned. Only now I find myself wishing that I have a Raven at work as well as at home. While the Fujitsu is an excellent scanner, the Raven which does not require a computer to be on or even present at all has won me over. There is a convenience that the Raven has that I feel the Fujitsu cannot match. I scan the document on the scanner. I rotate it if needed. I can name the document directly in the scanner, and then send it to the cloud destination of my choice, all from the scanner itself.2. There has been a recent update, and I am not sure if I didn't notice this feature previously or if it is new. In either can set multiple destinations for a single scan. That is to say; I can have the scan go to both DropBox and GoogleDrive, at the same time.3. I placed a document with text printed on one side and nothing on the other. I selected a 2-sided scan, front side up, and then scanned it. I then hoped it would auto-detect and result in a single-sided scanned page. Yup, worked like a charm.4. In the GoogleDrive, I can traverse the Google Drive hierarchy directly from the scanner and have the scan go to a specific folder.5. Email is the same as far as I can tell, but the folks at Raven reached out to me and let me know that a feature that remembers previous email addresses should come in the form of an update in the future.I have used the scanner to do minor things like rotate pages, and name the document before sending it to its final destination. I like this feature quite a lot.6. Now the only problem is that I think I'm going to have to buy another one of these for the office.

I have a home office that has been fully digitized. I scan everything, and keep almost no paper documents. Over the years I have scanned more than 6000 documents, and they are stored as searchable PDF files on my MacBook Pro. I used to have 3 filing cabinets full of papers. Now I have just a handful of paper originals that fit into 1/3 of a cabinet. If you haven't started scanning your documents yet, then you should start now. It'll completely change the way you manage documents.In this review I'll be comparing all of the scanners that I have used:• Fujitsu iX500• Epson DS-870• Raven Scanner ProFujitsu ScanSnap iX500I started with the ScanSnap iX500 several years ago. It was a great scanner back when I first purchased it. It was fast, accurate, and quiet. Unfortunately the iX500 software has become less reliable over time. Each time there was a new Mac OS update, I had to download the latest iX500 drivers, reinstall them, and fix compatibility problems. Then last Spring (2019), the iX500 required completely new software called ScanSnap Home. I didn't like the new user interface, and it had some annoying bugs, but I managed to tolerate it for a few months.Finally, Mac OS Catalina came out, and the iX500 took a turn for the worse. Once again I had to install new iX500 software. Unfortunately there was a significant bug this time: The drivers caused one of the CPU cores on my Mac to run at 100% all the time. This would happen whether the ScanSnap application was running or not. My computer was slower because of this, and the fans would run full-time to keep things cool. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers a couple of times, but that didn't help. In short, if you are running Mac OS Catalina, then stay away from the iX500.Epson DS-870Next I tried the Epson DS-870. It had some good reviews online, and it seemed quite promising. However, after using it for a couple of days, I can't recommend it for Mac users. The biggest problem is that you can't scan documents using the front control panel on the scanner. Each time that I used the front panel to scan documents, it would scan all of the pages, and then freeze. The only way to fix the problem was to reboot the scanner. I imagine this feature must have worked at some point, but it never worked for me. Perhaps it wasn't compatible with Mac OS Catalina? I'm not sure. I installed the latest Epson drivers that claimed to be Catalina compatible, but that didn't help.My workaround was to scan using the Epson Document Capture app on my Mac. That worked fairly reliably. However, there were a few times when the scanning software displayed communication errors. I was never able to debug what caused that, but it seemed to happen when I launched the software first, then turned on the scanner, and a tried to initiate a scan.Anyway, I found that I could get it working if I did everything in just the right order, and avoided using the front panel on the scanner. This all seemed too finicky, and I didn't have any confidence that the scanner would keep working with future Mac OS updates. I'll be returning this scanner soon.Raven Scanner ProFinally, I decided to try the Raven Scanner Pro. If you haven't researched this scanner yet, then go take a look. It's a completely new concept, and I freakin love it! This scanner has totally changed the way I do scanning. Best of all, it's 100% compatible with Mac OS Catalina. Why? Because you don't have to install any software.This scanner sends documents directly to the cloud. You don't even need a computer to use it.Most old-school scanners like the ScanSnap iX500 or Epson DS-870 are controlled by your computer. Naturally this requires drivers and scanning software, and that's where all of the compatibility problems come from. Well, the Raven Scanner Pro avoids those issues by scanning directly to the cloud. You can scan to Raven Cloud, DropBox, Evernote, Box, e-mail, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, or a USB stick.At first I thought this would be a problem for me, because I don't like storing too many documents in the cloud. It's too much of a security risk. After all, what will happen if somebody hacks into my DropBox account, and gains access to everything that I scanned during the last few years. That sounds frightening.Well, here is what I do instead. I scan directly from the Raven Scanner to DropBox, the files magically appear on my Mac a few moments later. Then I rename the files, and drag them into folders on my Mac. They only exist in the cloud temporarily. In other words, I'm just using the cloud as a conduit for getting files from the scanner to my Mac.This scanner completely changed my workflow too. Previously I would do this with my old-school scanners:1) Turn on my Mac.2) Launch the scanner app.3) Turn on the scanner.4) Drop a document into the scanner, and scan it.5) Wait for image analysis and OCR to finish.6) Save the document.7) Turn off the scanner.8) Turn off the Mac.My new workflow with the Raven is so much simpler:1) Turn on the scanner.2) Drop a document into the scanner, and scan it. Walk away, I'm done.Then later in the week, after scanning documents over multiple days, I finally turn on my Mac, rename and move the files around, and I'm done. I basically use DropBox as an in-box of scanned documents, and I wait until a few of them have accumulated before I organize them.All that being said, the Raven Scanner Pro isn't perfect. Here are a few issue:• It takes up a little more desk space than the ScanSnap iX500 and Epson DS-870.• The scanning quality is good, but not quite as good as the Epson.• It can't scan receipts that are longer than 15".• It has a bright flashing blue light when it's asleep.• DropBox uploads are pretty slow.• When uploading to Raven Cloud, your web browser doesn't refresh automatically to show the new file.• Scanning at 400 DPI or higher is quite slow.• It makes some fan noise. It's not crazy loud or anything, but it's not silent like my other scanners were.Fortunately I found some solutions:• If you have receipts longer than 15", just cut them in half before scanning.• There is a product on Amazon called "LightDims". Use it to dim the flashing blue light, and that problem will be solved.• You don't have to wait for DropBox uploads to finish. Just keep scanning other documents, and it'll upload in the background.• Scanning at 400 DPI or higher doesn't seem necessary. 300 DPI looks great, and it's very fast.• Set the scanner to sleep after a few minutes. That will shut off the fan. Or you can put the scanner to sleep by pressing the button.I also had good experience with their tech support. I sent them some questions online, and received helpful answers within 20 minutes.I also get the impression that their software is being actively improved. When I first purchased the scanner it only had options for 200, 400, or 600 DPI. That was a problem initially, because I wanted at least 300 DPI. The 200 DPI setting was too low-res, and 400 DPI was too slow. Well, now they offer 300 DPI and it's really fast. Based on my experience so far, I bet we'll see additional improvements at a decent rate.Anyway, in case you can't tell, I really love the Raven Scanner Pro. I'll never go back to old-school scanners that require drivers on my Mac. I would give the Raven scanner a star rating of 4.2, but I'll round that up to a 5.And if you're running a Mac with Catalina, stay away from the ScanSnap iX500 or Epson DS-870.