Portable scanner: Quick Link Scan Pen

This is a portable scanner to scan printed information and store and upload it on a PC, notebook, PDA or a text-enabled cellphone. Apart from English, it can scan text in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and German. It can capture, store, edit and transmit text to a word-processing application. It can't scan red on white, white on red, blue on black and black on blue text. The output we got was clear and the accuracy was good, but you have to move the pen slowly over the document you're scanning. The pen can store up to 1000 pages of scanned text. It has a 128-pixel image sensor and 400 dpi resolution. The included software communicates with the PC via the bundled serial port interface or an optional USB cable or IR. It runs on two AAA batteries, has a 2 MB ROM and a 2 MB Flash RAM. We liked the table and charts function, which allowed scanning and transferring of tables, schedules and charts to a spreadsheet application. It can be used as an address book and can transmit information to Outlook or other mail applications. The Internet links can collect and transfer URLs directly to a browser or bookmark, however communication with IR devices can be an effort because of baud rate settings and IR drivers. Some IR drivers are ADAPTEC, ESI and PARALLAX. The system requirement is Win 9X/NT/2000/Me/XP, 16 MB RAM and 8 MB hard-disk space. 

The bottom line:

It would be helpful for students, researchers, authors and executives who need flatbed-scanning feature in a portable device.

Sudarshana Mishra