Several companies sell compact portable scanners that could almost fit inside the cardboard tube from a paper-towel roll: foot-long skinny gadgets with a slot that pulls in photos and papers and spits them out the back. The scan quality is surprisingly good, and the speed is decent (about two seconds a page). The huge drawback is that you can’t scan books, magazines or anything else that won’t slide through that slot.
If you can live with that limitation, you might consider the new, straightforwardly named Xerox Mobile Scanner ($250). It’s battery-powered, so you can scan anywhere (up to 300 scans on a charge). The scans can go directly to a flash drive you’ve plugged into the back, or onto a camera memory card, or over a USB cable to your computer.
But the Mobile Scanner’s truly useful twist is that it can be completely wireless. Not just no power cord, but no cable to your computer, either. It can fling your scanned photos or documents through the ether to almost anywhere: your iPhone or Android phone, for example. Your iPad or Android tablet. A laptop. Or even a Web site, where other people can immediately see and download the results.
I’ll wait here while you let that sink in. This means you: students, researchers, lawyers, real estate types, inspectors, genealogists, artists and business card collectors of all stripes. Now you can whip this foot-long scanner out of your bag, feed in a photo or page (from 2 by 2 inches up to 8.5 by 11.7 inches), and then marvel as it shows up on your phone, ready to forward to anyone in the world. Or onto your iPad, safely copied from the original, ready for instant retrieval. Score one for portability.
If you’re a true-blue technoholic, you might recognize certain themes of this story. You might have heard of the Eye-Fi card: a traditional SD memory card for cameras that, somehow, also contains Wi-Fi wireless circuitry. Pop this thing into any camera model, and it suddenly becomes a Wi-Fi camera, capable of transmitting your photos to your computer, phone or a photo gallery Web site like Flickr.
In creating its Mobile Scanner, Xerox didn’t bother reinventing the wireless wheel. Instead, it worked with the Eye-Fi people to develop a customized version of their magic little card. The chief enhancement: The Xerox version of the Eye-Fi card is capable of transmitting PDF documents wirelessly, not just photos. (It’s worth noting that it’s otherwise a standard Eye-Fi card. When you’re not scanning, you can pop it into your camera and transmit photos wirelessly from it.)
When you unpack the silver plastic Mobile Scanner (it comes with an attractive black carrying case), the only setup is inserting the Eye-Fi card — a 4-gigabyte model — into a slot on the back and charging up the scanner’s built-in battery, either from a wall outlet or from your computer’s USB jack.
There are only two buttons: Power and Mode, which lets you choose which kind of scan you want: a color photo, a black-and-white PDF document or a color PDF document.
Once you’ve made your selection, you feed your photo or paper into the front slot. The scanner gives you a couple of seconds to get the thing straight, and then slurps the sheet in with satisfying speed, grip and confidence.
If you’re in one of the PDF modes, the scanner gives you 10 seconds to feed it the next sheet of a multipage document. The result is a single PDF document with multiple pages. Nice.
The scans are clean, straight and sharp. You’d have a hard time telling them apart from the work of a big-footprint desktop flatbed home scanner.
Except that this time, they’re appearing on the screen of your phone, tablet or laptop — wirelessly.
In other words, Xerox has done a beautiful job of making its machine solid, simple and competent.
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