The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #139005   Message #3185143
Posted By: IvanB
10-Jul-11 - 08:33 PM
Thread Name: Tech: Hand Held Scanners. Anyone Use Them?
Subject: RE: Tech: Hand Held Scanners. Anyone Use Them?
I have a Planon Docupen 800 (mentioned in one of the links above) that I paid big bucks for and I'll happily give to whoever might want it. Although it does a fair job of scanning if you're steady enough, it's cheaply built, especially the SD card holder which is so flimsy the scanner would only show a card present about 20% of the time. And, if you want to transfer files from the scanner's memory (8 MB), be prepared for a long wait.

Earlier this summer I saw a VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Portable Scanner (PDS-ST410-VP) on Amazon.com (US) for $65 US, shipping included. Even though I'd been soured by my experience with the Docupen, I figured I'd give the VuPoint a try. I can say I've been much happier with this unit than the Docupen $230 US in 2008). It's much more forgiving of an unsteady hand while scanning. One drawback to it is that it scans only in jpg format at either 300 or 600 dpi. As a test, I scanned (at 600 dpi) a sheet of music from a "fake book" with it. Since Photoscore doesn't accept jpg files, I had to transfer the jpg to tif format. Even with all the finagling Photoscore was able to read the file as well as many high quality pdf's I've fed it before. All in all, I'm a pretty happy camper. BTW, the VuPoint has an 8.5+ scan window and accepts micro SD cards up to 32 GB.