Understanding the lingo:  ADF, DADF and RADFs

Printer Services Newsletter 7.0

Understanding the lingo:  ADF, DADF and RADFs

In a brochure for a multifunction printer you will come across the acronyms ADF, DADF and RADF when they start talking about scanning and copying.  This is the part on top of the printer that can take multiply pages and feeds them through one at a time to either copy or scan the document.  On multi function printers you will also have the choice of scanning on the flatbed as well as through the ADF.  Scanning on the flatbed is great for single, one sided sheets but will be nowhere near as efficient as the ADF for multiple pages.

 
Let’s make sense of these acronyms:

ADF - An Automatic Document Feeder is a feature which takes several pages and feeds the paper one page at a time into a scanner assembly, allowing the user to scan or copy multiple-page documents without having to manually replace each page. The vast majority of multi function printer are also fax machines and by having an ADF, allowing the unattended sending of multi-page faxes. 

RADF - A Reversing Automatic Document Feeder, it scans one side of a page, then flips it and scans the other side. This is great for the automatic scanning of both sides of a double sided document but is slower than a single pass duplex scanner because of the time taken to flip and rescan the page. Because of the extra movements and rollers these scanners tend to have jamming problems as they wear.

DADF - A Duplexing Automatic Document Feeder or DADF scans both sides in one pass by using two independent scan heads instead of the single head the other types use. As you can imagine this is an advantage of the DADF over the RADF as it is faster for two-sided originals. The other main advantage is that it can handle damaged & thicker documents with much less chance of document jams because the single pass means less curl and movement in the pass through path.