Portable Scanners Have Image Issues
The promise of new hand-held scanners is tantalizing. These portable devices, mostly shaped like highlighter pens, seem to offer a new way of life for students, businesspeople and anyone else who has ever had to copy an address, a paragraph or a page from a book or magazine.
Unfortunately, the lower-priced hand-held scanners are technological underachievers. For the most part, the gizmos--still not cheap at $99 and up--fail to live up to their potential or hype. Not all the news is bleak, though. Depending on the task, a few portable readers do better on a first scan than I do on a first type.
The best contenders are specialized or pricier players--some as much as $299. The lower-cost pen scanners and their optical character recognition technology, or OCR, aren’t quite ready for everyday use.
I tried four scanners--picked because of good ratings, low prices or both. The first two, Siemens’ Pocket Reader and WizCom Technologies’ QuickLink, are reasonably priced, portable and pen-like. Corex’s CardScan and Hewlett-Packard’s CapShare provide a chance to see how the more expensive small scanners fared on a test of magazine pages and business cards.
Pocket Reader failed to read even its own enclosed test page, which presumably offers optimal paper, type, color, font and so on.
All my early scans yielded the messages “line lost” and “no line found.” Funny, neither of these phrases appeared on the practice sheet. When I finally got an actual reading, Pocket Reader displayed “. . . J:!;)ii”’!’!::!’ . . . “ That wasn’t on the test page either.
I tried again and this time, the practice page line “Try scanning this line of text with your Pocket Reader” came out “ry scanning this jjne of text uNith your Pocket Reaier.” Granted, the product information suggested a steady hand and moving in a straight line. Maybe this scanner is best used by surgeons and artists.
So what happened with actual, real-life text? You guessed it, very little. “Sarah H. Bartholomew” and a phone number became: “SwahH. Bardlclcmew 212-947,” meaning even if I could read the name, I couldn’t call her because I’m missing the last four digits of her phone number.
A better and pricier option came in WizCom Technologies’ QuickLink Pen, which lists for $159.
Guidelines on the pen help less-than-perfect artists put the pen in the right spot. And a tighter scanning surface means that QuickLink scans the small type of books and magazines far more accurately than Pocket Reader.
It also offers a few very useful functions, including infrared beaming directly to my Palm Pilot and templates for specialized scans. To scan a business card or other written address, it offers an address form on the pen window, allowing the user to separately enter first name, last name and other information.
Although not exactly time-saving, it’s still better than typing. Using the form also puts all the data in the right places once beamed to a Palm’s address book.
Users can also choose to enter text as memos or Web addresses. Once saved and transferred to a PC, QuickLink automatically treats the URLs as links, allowing users to go to the scanned Web site with just a click.
But QuickLink couldn’t read even my most careful handwriting. And there are other imperfections.
Multiple functions loaded onto a pen means buttons with several tasks each. Making corrections on the scanner was cumbersome because I could use only space-by-space deletions and an unfortunate system that requires directing the cursor to letters of the alphabet.
In short, you could more quickly watch yourself grow old. Given QuickLink’s misreads, on-scanner corrections are key--downloading a large volume of information and correcting later is a drag, especially because of something as simple as a dropped letter.
To get a sense for the portable scanner universe, I tried two other specialty readers, the Corex CardScan 500 and the HP CapShare 920 Portable e-Copier.
I was prepared to hate the $299 CardScan. For starters, it’s clunky, heavy and clearly meant as a desk accessory. On top of that, the machine first forced me to recheck my wires about 18 times. I finally called tech support, waited on hold and eventually got a very nice technician who guided me through reconfiguring the port speed on my ancient laptop.
Most of all, I thought I wouldn’t like CardScan because given all the multiuse portable scanners, why would anyone want a contraption that works only on business cards?
Because it works better and faster than anything else.
Having just returned from a conference with a slew of business cards, I let CardScan have at them. I first gave it my own card as a test. CardScan immediately put everything in the right place.
Because the name of my employer is written just as it appears on the front page, in a gothic script, CardScan wrote “Los Angeles Times” as “Boe An9elee me.”
The data entered needs to be checked carefully, though CardScan retains an image of the card, complete with handwritten scrawls. Because business cards get goofier every year, CardScan is likely to hit increasing numbers of snags. Colors are a no-no for CardScan, which just spits those babies out with the message “No image saved.”
In spite of all this, I have hope that one day I will find, for a reasonable price, the portable scanner of my dreams--one that combines CardScan’s label detection, QuickLink’s portability and the accuracy of Hewlett-Packard’s CapShare 920 Portable e-Copier.
I ordered HP’s $299 tool to see whether any hand-held scanner could be worth that much money.
CapShare is awkward to use--it’s shaped like a small sandwich--and requires a counterintuitive procedure, starting in the upper left-hand corner of a page, moving down and then over to the bottom right and up to the top right in a gigantic “U.”
Somehow, through all of that, it captures images in awesome perfection--on colors or on bright white.
But what is perhaps most amazing is its relative ease. The buttons make sense and the instruction book, unlike most of the other scanners, is more a leaflet than a tome.
Here’s praying that like the old rudimentary VCRs, which once sold for four figures, HP will eventually offer a less awkward color-scanning device at a fraction of the cost.
As it stands, the portable scanners--even the CapShare--remind me of the old toaster-size cellular telephones that came with their own suitcases. They are just the beginning, and we’re probably better off waiting for the technology to catch up with the dream.
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Times staff writer Abigail Goldman covers retailing.
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Connect: Check out other e-Review columns at https://www.com/ereview
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Pocket Reader
* What it does: Transmits text from a printed source to a computer
* Price: $99.95
* Manufacturer: Siemens
* Availability: https://www.bn.com, https://www.levenger.com
* Dimensions: 6.24 inches by 1.5 inches by 1 inch
* Weight: 3 ounces
* The good: Cool concept
* The bad: On a good day, it reads about as well as a first-grader.
* Bottom line: Not quite ready
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QuickLink Pen
* What it does: Transmits text from a printed source to a computer
* Price: $159
* Availability: Electronics and office-supply stores
* Manufacturer: WizCom Technologies Inc.
* Dimensions: 6 inches by 1.5 inches by 1 inch
* Weight: 3 ounces
* The good: Cool abilities
* The bad: A terrier could type the information faster.
* Bottom line: If “cool” is more important than “quick,” this could be your system.
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Corex CardScan 500
* What it does: Transmits text from business cards to a PC or PDA
* Price: $299
* Manufacturer: Corex Technologies
* Availability: Electronics and office-supply stores
* Dimensions: 6.9 inches by 2.35 inches by 5.7 inches
* Weight: 1.7 pounds
* The good: Helpful at organizing stacks of business cards
* The bad: Requires a fair amount of reviewing and editing. Also, it’s only for business card use.
* Bottom line: Great for a professional convention-goer
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CapShare 920 Portable e-Copier
* What it does: Transmits text and graphics to a PC or PDA
* Price: $299
* Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard Co.
* Availability: Electronics and office-supply stores
* Dimensions: 5.5 inches by 4.1 inches by 1.5 inches
* Weight: 12.5 ounces
* The good: Sophisticated, accurate reproduction
* The bad: Weird shape, awkward movement
* Bottom Line: Top dollar to match top-of-the-line technology--a big clash with its clunky shape and limited capability.
