Moving pictures

Entrepreneur, June, 1997 by Jill Amadio

Are your pockets stuffed with new customers' business cards whenever you're on a trip? Is your briefcase bulging with travel receipts, sales orders and invoices you should have sent to your office a week ago, but you couldn't find a fax machine? Are you spending too many hours in the office retyping printed reports into your computer, or do you want to add a drawing to a document but don't know how?

Don't despair; help is available. The secret is a portable scanner. No longer a simple image-maker that just "reads" a document and then transfers its text and graphics to a computer, the new scanners are multitasking: They can also fax, copy, print, file and e-mail.

Desktop scanners are more expensive, heavier, larger and of a higher quality than portables; portable sheet-fed scanners, however, are compact, lightweight, stand-up versions geared toward those scanning mostly text and spreadsheets. Sometimes called "personal scanners," they are similar in size and shape to a three-hole punch or a small inkjet printer. Most portable scanners are only a few inches high and deep and an average of 12 inches long, so they fit neatly behind your keyboard. To save even that small amount of space, last year Visioneer and Compaq introduced a stand-alone keyboard with a built-in scanner.

Instead of carrying around stacks of reports, letters or brochures, you can scan them into your computer, e-mail them to a network computer, then dump the originals. Your office printer can then generate copies.

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Business cards and other documents can not only be sent back to your desktop computer electronically, but you can also file the data into your laptop to keep a permanent record while you're still on the road.

Text, graphics and photos can be imported into your computer, although most portable scanners cannot accept anything over 8.5 inches wide. Length isn't a problem, however; Visioneer's PaperPort Vx and tax, for example, will take a 30-inch-long document. Most portable scanners accommodate standard 20-pound weight paper, and some accept 40-pound. Prices range from $149 to $345.

One or two handheld, palm-sized scanners, the size of a computer mouse, are on the market, and we've included one in our chart. They are useful for scanning bound pages, as in books, that cannot be sheet-fed into a machine. However, handheld scanners cannot scan a complete page at once because of their small size; several passes over a document are usually necessary. One versatile option is Logitech's PageScan Color Pro, which allows users to sheet-feed documents or, by snapping the head off the scanner's base, scan bound books.

All in all, the small-business owner who needs a scanner both for the office and on the road should find the sheet-fed, portable version a perfect fit. One caveat: "Portable" is somewhat of a misnomer. While lightweight and easily packable, most portable scanners must be plugged into an outlet, often with an AC adaptor supplied by the manufacturer. Cable connectors are also usually provided.

Only two of the portable models we found are truly mobile. Visioneer's PaperPort is one, when used with an optional battery pack. The other is Mustek's Plug-n-Scan Page Color, which plugs in to your laptop's parallel port interface. Some models, such as the Plustek PageReader 800, require a standard interface card slot for interface cards (Plustek provides one free). Other models use a parallel port interface, where your printer is plugged in, or a SCSI interface, which provides faster operation than a parallel port. A SCSI interface costs around $150. One scanner, Logitech's ScanMan, requires a CD-ROM drive.

The only drawback to a sheet-fed model is the possibility of photographs or documents on thick paper being curled or bent as they pass through the machine's rollers. If you work with a large number of photos, you may prefer a flatbed scanner.

How do sheet-fed scanners work their magic? Documents are fed into a roller-type opening, processed, then released through a second slot. Some models are paper-activated - that is, you don't need to press an on/off button or switch; the machine simply starts scanning as soon as the document is inserted.

Inside the machine, a charge-coupled device (CCD) looks at the text or graphics fed into the opening and reflects "bits" of light off the image, similar to your fax machine. The greater the depth of the bits, the greater the number of colors that can be transferred.

A color scanner needs three times the number of bits of a black-and-white scanner. On average, color models provide 24 bits and several million colors; black-and-white models provide 4 to 8 bits and up to 256 shades of gray.

The CCD measures the reflections and converts them into data. Microsoft Windows or other software provided with the scanner interfaces between it and your computer and processes the transferred data. Most scanners are bundled with Windows 3.x plus a selection of programs such as CardScan SE, OmniPage Lite, Xerox TextBridge and PhotoDeluxe.