Let’s face it. The scanners on MFPs suck. Sometimes they are worse than nothing as you have this giant useless brick sitting on top of your perfectly fine printer. Gee, thanks drivers that randomly disappeared off the HP site. On the flip side, I also once had a perfectly fine scanner on top of a broken Epson printer. The scanner was amazing, and could scan 11×17 pages. But since the printer was broken, the scanner was unusable. Basically, MFPs are printers first and everything else last. There are MFPs that aren’t garbage, but you will not find them for $200 at Office Depot.
You will, however, find perfectly reasonable document scanners at Office Depot. Take the Epson ES-400 II that I just bought. I got through ten months worth of scanned receipts and other important documents in a little under 15 minutes. Scanning at 35 pages per minute will do that.
My old HP m426fdw will think about scanning for a minute or so before finally deciding to scan a page. It has to warm up, calibrate, and who knows what else, before it slowly transforms a page into bits. The ES-400 II, on the other hand, doesn’t even hesitate. As soon as the scan button is clicked it runs through the pile of paper queued up.
It’s aggravating that this $350 black box will now sit mostly idle. Was it worth it? Oh yes.