VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST415-VP

The VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST415-VP ($100 street) sounds like something that should be on the Hogwarts back-to-school recommended purchase list. But in reality (pun unavoidable), it's a portable scanner?one of the most portable available. If you need to scan on the go, and don't want to be weighted down with hardware, that alone makes it worth considering.

At 1.2 by 10.1 by 1.1 inches (HWD) and 0.4 pounds, you could argue that the PDS-ST415-VP is too big to call a magic wand. It certainly doesn't look as much like one as the PlanOn DocuPen Xtreme X05 ($369.99 direct 3.5 stars). However, both work essentially the same way for scanning. The sensor and rollers in both cases define the bottom. To scan, you start at the top of a page and sweep down, or start on the side and sweep across.

One other feature the two scanners share is that they don't need a computer to scan to. Instead they scan to memory and let you move the files to a computer later. Connect the PDS-ST415-VP by the supplied USB cable, and it will look like a USB drive to your computer so you can copy the files.

Setup and Scanning
There is not much to set up with this scanner. Just put in the two supplied AA batteries and insert a microSD or microSDHC card as memory to scan to. The only potential issue is that the scanner doesn't come with a memory card and there's no internal memory, so be sure you have one handy. According to the company, you can use cards with up to 32GB capacity.

Scanning is easy. The scanner offers one button to set it to color or black and white mode and another to set it to 300 or 600 pixels per inch (ppi). Simply choose your settings, and then scan. Just as important, there isn't much of a learning curve. I got acceptable scans starting with my first try, both for recognizing text, and for scanning photos well enough for, say, scanning an article and winding up with recognizable images in the photos.

Recognizing Text
In addition to setting up the hardware, you can optionally install Abbyy Screenshot Reader, which comes with the scanner and offers a limited ability to translate images of text into editable text. However, it's important to understand that Screenshot Reader is an OCR (optical character recognition) utility rather than a full-fledged OCR program.

The PDS-ST415-VP scans to JPG image file format. An OCR program would be able to recognize the text for at least one full file at a time. Screenshot Reader recognizes text showing on screen, and it can recognize only as much text as can fit on the screen.

Depending on your screen resolution, you may need to recognize a letter-size page of text in two or more pieces. In my tests using a 1,280 by 1024 screen resolution, for example, with the image zoomed in Photoshop to 33 percent and the text just fitting within the screen width, I had to recognize each page in three sections.

At smaller zoom sizes I could recognize more of the page, but the recognition accuracy dropped. At 33 percent zoom, the program read our Arial test page at font sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake and our Times New Roman test page at 12 points. At 12.5 percent, which is the largest zoom size that showed the full page at once, it couldn't read any font size without mistakes.

Other Issues
It's worth mention that although not needing a computer for scanning has the advantage of giving you less to carry with you, it has a disadvantage too. You can't see the scan and confirm that it's good enough to be usable until you connect to a computer, at which point you may no longer have the original handy to rescan. Depending on the situation, you may be better off skipping the scanner and taking a photo instead, so you can check the image quality on your camera or cameraphone's screen.

You can't count this too heavily against the PDS-ST415-VP, because it's pretty much standard today for portable scanners that don't need a computer, including, for example, the IRIScan anywhere 2 ($199, 3 stars) from I.R.I.S. and the Pandigital Personal Photo Scanner/Converter PanScn06 ($149.99, 3 stars). One the few exceptions is the Editors' Choice Visioneer Mobility ($199.99 direct, 4 stars), which lets you scan to a smartphone and see the results on the spot.

Despite this limitation, if you want to use a scanner rather than a camera, and you want one that's portable enough to carry with you virtually all the time, the PDS-ST415-VP is definitely in the running. When you compare prices with the alternatives, keep in mind that you'll need to buy a memory card and may want a more capable OCR program or a document management program as well. Even so, the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST415-VP is a more than reasonable choice. It has little to no learning curve, it's easy to use, and its scan quality is up to the task.

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