Professional desktop scanners 2025

If you can't go paperless office, at least go “paper-lite”. Dave Mitchell reviews four desktop scanners that will ease you along the way

- 

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) that want organised offices and tidy workspaces need to ditch their filing cabinets and move to document digitisation. Going paperless, or even just “paper-lite”, is the way forward, and investing in a document scanner can reap many benefits, including reduced office space requirements, increased productivity and improved compliance with data protection rules.

With office rental costs rising all the time, businesses can save hard cash: once paper records have been scanned, they can be sent to a secure storage facility instead of occupying large swathes of valuable office floor space. Digitisation will improve workflow efficiencies and customer experiences too, as staff won't need to waste time searching through filing cabinets looking for that crucial invoice or sales record.

Keeping paper records in an office is a big security risk since there’s no easy way to protect them from unauthorised access, tampering and theft, or disasters such as fire and flooding. Digital records are much easier to protect; they can be secured with passwords and encryption and integrated into a data backup strategy.

The transformation to a digital workplace won't require a large investment either. This month, we put four business-class desktop scanners from Brother, Canon, Epson and Ricoh through their paces to help you make the right buying decision.

MFP or dedicated scanner?

Multifunction printers (MFPs) offer the convenience of print, scan and copy functions in a single device, and at competitive prices. There will be compromises, though, as most business-class MFPs have slow scan speeds plus limited paper capacities and may create a production bottleneck as users queue up to print, scan and copy from the same device.