Spoiler alert: I decided to return this scanner.I really wanted to love it. Here's what I was looking for in a scanner1. High quality, fast scans2. Good OCR (optical character recognition - the ability to convert a scanned document into searchable/editable text)3. The ability to connect to the scanner via more than one device over WiFi so that multiple people in my household can use it4. Mobile scanning, so that I can scan something directly to my phone5. Ease of use of both software and hardware, so being paperless is easy and low friction6. Plays nice with Evernote7. Looks good on my desk. Committed to being paperless, my scanner has a permanent place on my desk - bonus points of it looks good.Here's how it measured up:1. This machine churns out high quality and fast scans. Scans up to 1200 dpi which is pretty awesome. Kudos.2. OCR is one of the main reasons why I returned this machine. There is no OCR available if you are scanning to a mobile device. This feature is only available if you're using your computer. Furthermore, OCR is only possible on your computer if you are saving a PDF for your computer. If you are saving to the cloud (Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, etc - no OCR is available). Anything else will require more than one step: you'll have to save it to your computer first and then save it to the cloud. Meaning, this is fine if you're just saving a PDF to your desktop. For me personally, that one extra step to get things on the cloud is enough friction to make me postpone scanning anything.3. This is a network scanner - it gets major bonus points for being able to connect to any of the devices I threw at it that were also on my WiFi network. Mind you - setup is not easy with this thing but eventually you'll figure it out eventually. I was able to connect a Mac computer, an Android phone, and an iPhone no problem.4. Mobile scanning works with any mobile device hooked up to the same WiFi network. However, features limited on mobile, like no OCR mentioned above. You can download the brother ""iprint And scan"" app and see for yourself.5. The hardware on this machine seems great - it has nice features like a handy touchscreen. The software on the other hand, ""oh, brother!"" - it is a hot mess! It crashes sometimes on my Mac (running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4) and just generally clunky to use. Not all features are available depending on where you want to scan to (for example, scanning to cloud limits feature set). Also, there is no editing once it's scanned, meaning no ability to easily adjust crooked images and things like that.6. This works with Evernote. However, because you get fewer features if you scan directly to Evernote, I didn't bother much.7. This is obviously the least important thing: how it looks on my desk. For how robust it is, the size is reasonable. It wouldn't be fair to compare it to a compact scanner so I won't - I'm totally fine with the size of this thing and I live in a smallish apartment. The off-white color is a bad choice - it looks like it was made before I was born! I'm a design snob and I would rather it come in black or white - or really any color but ""yucky beige"". This isn't why I returned it but it was kind of an eye-sore.
