Wow! I am in lust!! It is now possible to take a scanner with you wherever you go. The new $200 device is tiny. In fact, it’s called a Planon DocuPen:
As the name implies, the handheld scanner is roughly the size of a long pen or pencil--roughly 8 1/2 inches long by 1/2-inch thick. You put the DocuPen at the top of a page, you press a button to turn it on and then just start rolling the device down the page.
It takes only four seconds to scan a business-size letter. A small red light flashes if you go too fast, so you quickly learn the speed range of the gadget. If you go too slow it just shuts itself off thinking you have finished with the scan.
The DocuPen has enough memory to store about 100 pages digitized into monochrome digital images. This amazing little 2-ounce device can scan almost anything, including pictures.
At $200 the DocuPen is a great tool for anyone who wants to capture images when they are out and about. Menus, business cards, photographs, letters, books, or forms, including your signature, are all easily captured. When you get to a computer the device connects via an included USB cable to transfer the images.
The DocuPen comes with software from ScanSoft called PaperPort 8.0 SE that offers many features and benefits. The software will manage your scanned documents and connect to your existing programs such as Outlook, Notepad, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel and many more. I have been a faithful PaperPort user for about eight years--I do not think there is any more user-friendly software application on the market for scanning and organizing the resulting images.
I currently use a Visioneer Strobe XP 100 as a portable scanner. It is huge compared to the DocuPen, but it fits easily into the computer bag I use to carry my little Dell Latitude around. In order to do the job, I have to have the scanner connected to the Latitude to store scanned images--the Strobe has no internal memory. The DocuPen is a huge improvement not only in size and weight, but because no computer is needed to save the images it is also much easier to use.
