Portable Scanners

Portable scanners are one of those devices that before you have it you can do without ,but once you get one you never go back.Many professionals and students save alot of time with these!

The business man can easily scan travel reciepts and store and them electronically,organise collected business cards.Getting rid of clutter and getting the stuff filed on the spot saves alot of time in the long run.Very usefull !

The student can scan pages from library books,scan photos and documents.You can scan a 14' legal document,perfect for lawyers.If you're visiting clients off-site, your portable scanner also gives you the ability to make a record of key documents on the spot.

What to look out for ?

When working with a mobile scanner, you typically feed pages up to 8.5' wide through one side of the device, and they come out the back. The scanner connects to your workstation with the included USB cable. (Most manufacturers will support USB 1.1 but the 2.0 (High Speed) interface is recommended for best performance.) Since scanning can use a lot of resources, most manufacturers recommend a minimum amount of free hard drive (HD) space and system memory (RAM).

Resolution the default being color 150 dots per inch (dpi), b&w 300 dpi, while the highest quality is approximately color 600 dpi, b&w 1,200 dpi. (Again, black & white scans faster than color, and low resolution (dpi) scans faster than high resolution);

Scanning Speed Is typically expressed as pages per minute or PPM. Speed is affected by a number of factors including:

1. the type of scan, single-sided (Simplex) or double-sided (Duplex). Simplex scanning is faster than duplex.

2. The power source (USB vs. AC) can affect the speed by as much as 2 pages per minute.

3.Output Display (black & white scans faster than color);

When travelling with computer equipment, road warriors often prefer a lighter load. The device weight stated typically does not include the power adapter and /or USB cable. Weight can also be an indicator of durability and power.

There are several types of portable scanners,Wand type devices you manually drag over the page or more typically you just feed the page in one end and it comes out the other.

Most portable scanners use a single USB cable connection. The USB cable connects the scanner to your computer and provides power.Some scanners come with an ac adapteror .

Alternatively the wand type scanners are powered by AA batterys and use an SD card to store data which you can allways upload later.More usefull for scanning pages in a book or even unusual surface like a wine label on a bottle.

Bundled Software Documents will often scan to a PDF format, but the applications that come with a scanner can speed up the process, and give you more flexibility in organizing and managing

items such as photos and business cards.

There are plenty of options out there and these are a few things to consider when looking for the right scanner.You can pick one up from around 100 dollars and well worth the investment for the time saved and convenience.