Earlier this year while I was at the Consumer Electronics Show I had the chance to see the DocuPen Portable Scanner demonstrated, and had hoped to be able to try it out myself at some point.
Over the past two weeks I have had a DocuPen here in my Office, and although I have a flatbed scanner in the office I wanted to see if the scanner I have here could largely be replaced by this small hand held scanner.
The DocuPen scanner itself is remarkable small, and yet is able to scan a single sheet paper in my opinion faster than my regular scanner. I used it to scan pictures, text, store receipts and various other documents that I have to keep for either tax or record keeping purposes.
Even more amazing is that the Docupen can be thrown in my computer bag and travel with me. It has a internal battery and connects to a PC with a USB cable to re-charge and down-load scanned media.
The settings are on the hand held scanner itself allow you to choose between High Rez, 24 bit color, Standard Rez and 12 bit color. It has 8mb of on-board flash memory and a speed indicator. With capability to scan up to 400dpi
The speed indicator on the DocuPen only ever really come into play on the highest resolution settings. This allowed me to pace the scan speed to scan at 400dpi without issues. I was worried on how the document scan alignment would come out, it was largely a non issue.
The software it comes with is PaperPort which is a well respected scanning software. I had no issues using it with my other scanning software as well and the OCR software I use which is a high end software product worked well with the DocuPen as well.
The Planon DocuPen packs a lot of features in a very tiny package. Portability comes with a price as the unit Retails for $299.00 but do not let the prices scare you. If you want scanner product that you can travel with or have it sit on the desk as a primary scanning source you will be safe with this product.
My flatbed scanner takes up a lot of room on a shelf. The DocuPen takes up the space of about 3–4 pencils.
As a side note this is a product that has allowed me to scan some documents that I would have never been able to scan before.
Case in point we have a very old family Bible with a significant number of pages with written notes on. The only way I could have captured that data before was to have had the binding removed of this 150 year old family heritage piece. The DocuPen scanned every page I needed scanned in under 20 minutes with the Bible sitting on my desk. Absolutely amazing.
Check out the Plannon website today and as the say on their web page Plannon DocuPen
Disclaimer: This review has been done under our normal review policy of actually using the product a minimum of 3 days. DocuPen was provided to Geek News Central for free to do the review.