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
They are from Maplin.
where is it possible to buy it??? thanks
what a great idea!
wow this is a great gadget
Fantastic prize
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!
awesome
a seriously useful gadget. Don’t know how I’m managing without it
what a great little gadget
looks like a fab gadget. bit of a dissapointment with the software though
Fab Gadget 🙂
Great useful item
looks interesting
I’ve never seen these before,but I scan a lot,so this would be really useful 🙂
What a fantastic invention, always handy to have a portable scanner!!
cool lol very nice
Nice idea – good that it’s so portable.
Very good idea, it looks awesome!
could do with one of these – they look great
Looks great! Will mention this to my friend for her son off to uni
I haven’t heard about these before, sounds like a good idea though.
A clever idea, but I don’t think my hands are steady enough!
Definately be great for my brother, great post! So small!
I love the idea. I can see it being very useful. We might get one of those 🙂
Such a good idea, perfect for when I have to go do my research in other libraries!
This would be such a help with my uni work !!
i loved this review i have never seen a small scanner like that before very handy a great idea 🙂
Really good gadget.
Looks great 🙂
this would be perfect for me please
I have wanted a portable scanner for so long!! They look SO useful!
I would love to own this, very handy 🙂
Ohh that looks really good!! Very fancy 🙂
Looks very useful
Great idea, thanks for the review.
Cool
wow looks great and easy to use
look really easy to use
wow thats pretty cool
Wow I’ve never heard of these before, I think I’m a bit behind the times with technology, it sounds really good!
I would be interested in seeing the results on this for myself. It looks like a very usefull little scanner. Especially for helping the boys with their homework.
sounds really useful!
My dad would find this really useful.
I used to use these when I worked with students with additional needs. They’re brilliant, and this is great because it’s not ‘on a wire’ 🙂
This is actually a great idea, I can imagine students would find it really useful.
Looks like a great scanner and really easy to use! I could do with one of these for my work x Charlotte Clark