DocuPen: A Scanner The Size Of A Toothbrush
The DocuPen is designed to scan 8.5" wide pages in black and white without any computer assistance. It connects to the PC via USB for download and for battery recharge. It can store about 100 monochrome pages before you have to dump its 2Mb flash memory to disk. Picture this... You're sitting at lunch when your discussion unexpectedly turns
to a new business venture, so you and your colleague start to scrawl notes on
the napkin and your writing expands to the table top. You don't want to loose
the inspiration, but you also don't relish carrying the table out of the
restaurant. Rather than transcribing the notes, you roll your DocuPen across the
napkin, then across the table top and leave a nice tip on your way out the door.
Back at your office you plug the DocuPen into your PC and print a perfect copy
of your inspired notes.
The DocuPen is an exercise in minimalism. The device is designed to scan 8.5"
wide pages in black and white without any computer assistance. On top of that,
it's ultimately portable. The unit I tested, the DocuPen R-700, connects to the
PC via USB for download and for battery recharge. It can store about 100
monochrome
pages
before you have to dump its 2Mb flash memory to disk. That sounds like a lot of
scanning when you don't have a document feed, but it beats trying to find a copy
machine or worse, handwriting notes.
I was able to make clean scans using the DocuPen after only a few practice
tries. The R-700 is an updated version of the scanner that has been improved by
adding a second set of rollers and a rechargeable battery. The dual rollers help
keep the scanner moving in a straight line, and the LED on top of the scanner
let you know if you're moving the pen too fast for accurate scanning.
I scanned a variety of documents including standard office correspondence with
black ink, magazine pages, a color photo, and several pages from a book. Since
the DocuPen was designed for scanning individual pages of text, it performed
best when put to that task. Color photos are converted to high contrast images,
much as you might expect when attempting to send a color photo via fax. Magazine
pages came through admirably as long as the text was printed in a dark color,
and line diagrams looked great. I had trouble scanning pages from books when it
wasn't possible to flatten the book's spine. With a normal flat-bed scanner,
it's possible to scan a reasonable portion of the text that doesn't touch the
scanner bed, but it was difficult to keep the DocuPen tracking straight across
the curvature of an open book.
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