Well, I got the Plustek OpticSlim M12 Plus Mobile Scanner a few days ago so that I could go as paperless as possible, especially when travelling.
(Especially after the 10th time someone asked me to fax them something, and I had go around like a headless chicken to find a Fax Machine, or even a proper land line as we were completely off the grid and dependent on Cell's
)
Any way, this scanner is not going to be able to scan books ( raison d'être for many to get a scanner) as it is a single sheet fed scanner.
Specs are basic, with Colour scanning upto 600dpi.
It does have two advantages over most scanners you might have at home or in the office.
1) Its Super light and small - 47 x 247 x 33.8 mm and weights a paltry 370 Grams. Have a look
2) It runs of the USB. Yes a single USB port. Bye bye Ac adaptor, hello mobility
. Finally you don't need to be near a power point or have some expensive battery to be able to scan a few documents to either fax or email.
Now I've only had it for a few days, so I'm still learning to use it so take my points with a large grain of salt.
Lets look at the Pros and Cons
+ Small & Light
+ USB Powered
+ Reasonably fast - A4 B&W page aprox 10 Seconds, Colour 20+ seconds. Not bad for such a small scanner
+ Comes with a comparatively easy to use Setup, and includes all the basic including a Copy of Abby Finereader 6.0 Sprint for OCR
+ Scanning is easy , just feed in the paper and hit the scan button, and after that keep on feeding pages. you can choose what output you want.
+ Outputs Jpeg, Gif, BMP, PDF, or OCR'ed text into txt & doc.
+ Option to scan multiple pages at a time and auto generate a PDF or a OCR'ed Word doc. Very handy for emailing stuff.
+ Has two hardware buttons so you can set your preferences and not have to bother with the settings unless you want to change something
- It is not the highest quality, and I haven't found a way to do preview to tweak the settings inside its own software. So its probably not going to do for High res Photo scanning, but for most everyday stuff it should do quiet well.
- The feeder does require you to feed sheets in, in a certain way otherwise it tends to get skewed. It does take a few tries to get it right, especially if its on a non flat or moving surface. So its best to keep Autoskew correction on for all but the trickiest scans.
- Colours are kind of muted, but that may be because i've not really played around with the settings yet.
- OCR is ok but not the best, but its probably because this is a basic version of the software and I haven't dialled in the optimum settings yet.
This is just a preview. Hopefully I'll be able to do a full review in a couple of weeks.
Still, it does strike me that this could be very useful for a Illiad or Tablet Pc owner, as they could get in their documents in a Digital form and work with them.