December 2013

Why should you get a portable scanner?

During the last few years there has been a sharp increase in the amount of people who are digitizing their lives. Instead of using a big, bulky filing cabinet they are scanning their documents and storing them on hard drives and in the cloud. That’s the function of a document scanner: it takes your bills, papers, receipts, and other paper items and stores them so you can keep them safe and be able to search for them easily.

What about just using my phone?

Perhaps if you just need to keep track of a few documents or receipts then this might be the answer for you. An example of an iPhone application that is available on the market is Lemon Wallet, which is a great one that will make your receipts digital and tell you exactly where you spent your money.

What should I look for in a good portable scanner?

Before buying a scanner you should be asking yourself the following questions: what’s the quantity of stuff that I need to scan, what types of stuff will I be scanning, and how large do I need the scanner to be. Normally, the bigger the scanner, the more expensive it is. However the bigger machine means you can do a lot of paper at a much faster rate. Littler, less expensive units are slower, and most of the times don’t have important features. We’re only going to look at portable scanners like this one that does the job correctly without making you spend a lot of money.

We needed our perfect scanner to be utilized mostly for receipts and other documents, but one flexible enough to do other things, too, like a photo or business card once in a while. It also needed to be little enough to be easily moved, but strong enough to deal with a good sized pile of documents, which meant that an automatic feed system was necessary. Of course you don’t want to be sitting there putting in document after document if you have a huge pile that you’re dealing with.

On your last flight, you might have noticed that the Sky Mall magazine on the flight has a lot of advertisements for portable scanners. You might have seen some of the popular scanners that are available. There are a few problems with scanners like these. First off, you have to be with them while scanning each document as they don’t have an automated feed system and every document has to be carefully put into the feeder so that it can be processed. Nobody wants to do that.

That being said, an even larger issue is that they don’t have duplex scanning. When you have Duplex scanning it means that both sides are scanned simultaneously. If you want to get your scanning done quickly then you simply need to have this function as it will make your work go twice as fast. If you look at most documents you’ll notice that you need to scan both sides. Another big feature is optical character recognition that turns writing on images into text. With that feature you’ll be able to do searches later on for the text that appears on the documents.