Understanding the Different Kinds of Portable Scanners

With a portable scanner, you can scan and catalog all your receipts, invoices, photos easily without taking up too much space. Before going out and purchasing one, you should first understand the various kinds of mobile scanners (in order of decreasing size and increasing portability): sheetfed scanners, handheld scanners and pen scanners.

The sheetfed scanner is smaller than the traditional flatbed scanner. The latter is typically not considered portable. Compared to the other types of portable scanners, though, the sheetfed is definitely the largest. Unlike a flatbed where large items such as books can be placed face down on a glass panel in order to scan its pages, much like a normal photocopier, a sheetfed typically makes use of an automatic document feeder mechanism, like a regular printer. Stacks of documents can be placed in the feeder, and are then automatically fed through the scanner one sheet at a time. As a result, sheetfed scanners are great if you have a lot of documents needing scanning. The main attraction of a sheetfed over a flatbed is its portability: apart from the small size and light weight, sheetfed scanners can use USB power instead of an external adaptor, which makes them ideal for mobile scanning. Limitations include the inability to scan very large items or pages of a book without initially tearing them out, the relatively less detailed scan resolution, as well as the possibility of paper jams during the automatic paper feeding.

Smaller and thus even more portable than sheetfed scanners, handheld scanners are, as the name implies, scanners held by the hand. Items to be scanned need to be flat and have a fairly hard surface. The scanner is placed on top of the item (for instance, a book cover) and then moved steadily down. As you can imagine, this process requires a fairly firm hand. These scanners usually can be powered by batteries alone or a single USB connection. As with most other types of mobile scanners, scans can be saved temporarily to a memory card before being transferred to a laptop. The flexibility (for instance, you can scan DVD covers, various textures or pages of a book without tearing them out) and typically lower price range of handheld scanners compared to sheetfed ones make them an attractive choice of portable scanner. Take a look at Canon imageFORMULA P-150 portable scanner review for an example of a good document handheld scanner.

Pen scanners are shaped like a pen, and work much like a highlighter. Since they are held by the hand, they are by definition, handheld scanners and do require consistent, steady movement to avoid distortions. Such scanners are usually focused on document scanning alone, and come with special OCR (optical character recognition) software to recognize text and translate it into editable computer text documents. Some even come with the ability to translate the text automatically to a different language.

One thing to keep in mind when shopping around for portable scanners is: what will you be mainly using it for? Are you looking to archive all your old photos? If so, get a photo scanner which has been specially catered for scanning higher-quality images. Document scanners can of course scan photos as well, but the results will not be optimal. For a good example of an affordable photo scanner, take a look at this PanDigital Photolink One-Touch PANSCN06 portable scanner review.

A portable scanner is a useful tool for going paperless. It is a perfect choice for those who are constantly on the move and are searching for a versatile, compact piece of hardware to solve their scanning needs, provided a little loss in resolution (as compared to bulkier flatbeds) is an acceptable trade-off to them.