Are you sick of getting ripped off by using photocopiers in shops, public libraries and/or university? Then there’s the also the fact that you have to have the exact change for the machine. I received this Maplin EasyScan Portable Scanner for review. To be honest, I have not seen them before but they have been around for a long time. I think this portable scanner is great and is particularly useful for students for the portability and for the space saving design.
The scanner allows you to scan books, letters, photos and more by gliding the scanner over the surface of the page. It takes a lot of patience to scan the page with your steady hand. You have to do it slowly. The error light will flash up if you scan too quickly which you can see in the photo below. Once you get use to the technique, it does not take long to scan a page.
Where does it store?
Rather than having it hooked up to a PC while you scan, the portable scanner has a microSD card slot so you can store the images directly from the page on to the memory card. The scanner does not include the microSD card.
How do you transfer to your computer?
To transfer the images to your computer, you can take out the microSD card and insert it into your memory card reader. Alternatively, you can attach the portable scanner to your computer via a USB cable and drag and drop the files as needed. This is the way I had to do it because my laptop doesn’t read microSD cards.
What does it come with?
Inside the box, it comes with:
- scanner
- storage bag
- white balance calibration sheet
- USB cable
- CD
- cleaning cloth
- 2 AA batteries
What are the pros?
- The biggest pro is the portability. It is light and convenient to take out with you and you can leave the laptop at home.
- It is unobtrusive and discrete to use. It does not make any noise and there are no bright lights as with a flatbed scanner or multifunction printer.
- Images can be scanned with high or low resolution settings which is useful if you need to conserve storage space or if you need better quality images. For example a low resolution colour image might be approximately 412KB while the high resolution colour image would equivalently be 1.44MB. I noticed the high resolution image produced sharper results.
- The on/scan button is easy to use.
- It take only 2 AA batteries.
What are the cons?
- It is only able to scan A4 size or smaller.
- You need to buy a microSD card before it can be used.
- The default is low resolution and colour and it doesn’t remember your settings after turning off and back on again. I forgot to set the quality on a few occasions.
- It comes with OCR software called NimoDoc Lite on the CD which is supposed to be able to read text from your images. After persevering for over half an hour, I was still unable to pull any text out from my scanned images. I tried different images, colour, black and white, and tried outputting to different formats, text/pdf/word but was unsuccessful.
Overall, I like the product as a scanner but it lets itself down with the software so I rate this product 3.5 stars out of 5.
Disclosure: We received the sample for the purposes of writing this review, however, all thoughts and opinions remain our own.
Very useful. but needs to be used on flat surface
I have to hold a drink with both hands,
So forget the steady hands worry it’s no problem even for me,
Pity about the software, so use your own OCR
This is a brilliant idea! We have a scanner that is inbuilt to our printer, but this is fantastic, as we often need to scan images that we are unable to! Looks extremely useful, especially with a house full of little ones!
What a fantastic invention, always handy to have a portable scanner!!