Review: Docupen Handheld Scanner - Gift Suggestion
If you're a journalist that travels, the idea of having a portable scanner is enticing. Instead of shelling out for photocopies, you could move information from pages right into a laptop and cut the weight of dragging paper around. You could also email the files back home so should something happen to the computer, you have the information you need. (When on the road, I do this with interview files and any material I've written.) And the Docupen offers a good deal of promise.
I've used handheld scanners years ago, and the results were terrible. You'd have to practice a lot to get even scans and keep from having erratic hand motion stretch images and text in some cases and squash them in another. And then they took up some space. But when I received the test unit of the Docupen, I found these problems largely vanishing. Oh, you need some practice with it, but not much more than a few minutes. At that point I could get a fairly good scan. The unit itself is just over 11 inches long, as it lets you scan a full page, yet it's only a bit thicker than a pen. It comes with 8MB of memory onboard, which is completely inadequate if you're scanning in color (which the pen does). The company claims "up to 200 pages," but one page would take up at least a third of the memory. You can buy a small type of standard flash memory to greatly boost the amount, and I'd strongly suggest it. You connect the Docupen through a USB cable to your PC to charge it.
At $349 for the current special price, it's not cheap, but it's the best potential solution I've seen for the writer who needs to keep research without making his or her arms any longer from carrying a lot of paper.
If you don't want to spend the money but have a digital camera with high resolution, you can try bringing along a page-sized sheet of clear plastic. Put it on top of a page you need and, making sure no lights are reflecting off it, take a high resolution picture of the page. It's clumsier, but probably better than carrying paper.
I've used handheld scanners years ago, and the results were terrible. You'd have to practice a lot to get even scans and keep from having erratic hand motion stretch images and text in some cases and squash them in another. And then they took up some space. But when I received the test unit of the Docupen, I found these problems largely vanishing. Oh, you need some practice with it, but not much more than a few minutes. At that point I could get a fairly good scan. The unit itself is just over 11 inches long, as it lets you scan a full page, yet it's only a bit thicker than a pen. It comes with 8MB of memory onboard, which is completely inadequate if you're scanning in color (which the pen does). The company claims "up to 200 pages," but one page would take up at least a third of the memory. You can buy a small type of standard flash memory to greatly boost the amount, and I'd strongly suggest it. You connect the Docupen through a USB cable to your PC to charge it.
At $349 for the current special price, it's not cheap, but it's the best potential solution I've seen for the writer who needs to keep research without making his or her arms any longer from carrying a lot of paper.
If you don't want to spend the money but have a digital camera with high resolution, you can try bringing along a page-sized sheet of clear plastic. Put it on top of a page you need and, making sure no lights are reflecting off it, take a high resolution picture of the page. It's clumsier, but probably better than carrying paper.
Labels: product, review, technique, technology
posted by Erik Sherman | 9:03 AM
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