Pandigital Portable Wand Scanner with Feeder Dock (PanScn09)

The Pandigital Portable Wand Scanner with Feeder Dock (PanScn09) ($119.99 direct) is, well, a little different. Like the Xerox DocuMate 3115 ($399.99 direct, 4 stars) and the Visioneer Strobe 500 ($399.99 direct, 4 stars), which are both Editors' Choices, the Pandigital scanner comes with a dock. But instead of adding an automatic document feeder to a manual-feed scanner, the dock in this case adds a manual feed to a wand scanner (a scanner you roll across the page by hand). The result is highly portable either way? with or without the dock? and a potentially attractive choice, though with some limitations.

Like other Pandigital portable scanners I've reviewed, including, for example, the Pandigital Personal Photo Scanner/Converter PanScn06 ($149.99 direct, 3 stars), the PanScn09 enhances its portability by eliminating the need for a computer for scanning. Instead, it scans to a microSD card, and it comes with a 2-GB card to scan to. You can move the files to your computer later either with the supplied microSD adaptor, which plugs into an SD card slot, or by leaving the card in the scanner, connecting to your computer with the supplied USB cable, and then copying the files.

Not needing a computer means you can carry just the scanner, which weighs about 12 ounces. Even with the dock and power block, the weight is still only 1.8 pounds.

One particularly nice touch is that, unlike most scanners that don't need a computer, the PanScn09 includes a 1.8-inch color display to let you see your scans immediately, while you still have the originals at hand. The display isn't big enough to let you see details, like whether text is crisp and readable, but it will let you see if you got the entire original or just part of it. In most cases, that's enough to let you know if you need to rescan.

Setup and Power
Setting up the scanner involves little more than plugging in the microSD card. In addition, you can optionally install the one application program the scanner comes with: NewSoft Presto! PageManager, a document management program. The program is limited in many ways, but it includes an OCR module that will let you convert scanned documents to editable text or searchable PDF files.

One of the big disappointments for the scanner is how it gets it power. Ideally, both the dock and scanner should be able to run on battery power, the batteries should be rechargeable, and the scanner should be able to recharge its batteries from the dock. The reality is much different.

The scanner runs off batteries, and the manual suggests using rechargeable batteries, but you have to buy them separately. The dock runs strictly off of AC power. And if you get rechargeable batteries for the scanner, you'll have to take them out to charge them in an external charger. None of this counts as a major strike against the scanner, but it does make it a little less useful, than it could be. You can't use the dock, for example, if there's no power socket handy.

Scanning and Results
Scanning with the PanScn09 is simple enough. When you're using it as a wand scanner, you press a button, and then scan across the page. When you snap it into the dock to use as a manual-feed scanner, you feed the page far enough for the rollers to grab on to it, and then let go of the page to let it feed.

I found scanning by hand easy enough to get it right from the first try. Manually feeding the paper is tricky, however. There's so little extra width beyond the 8.5-inch page width that if you're at even the slightest angle, the edge of the paper will get wrinkled by the edge of the dock. It's not hard to get it right, but you have to pay attention to what you're doing, and you have to use both hands. I timed the actual scans with the manual feed at 4 to 9 seconds per page, depending on the settings, but you'll spend at least as much time on feeding each piece of paper.

Whether you're using the PanScn09 as a wand scanner or a manual feed scanner, you can set the resolution to 300 or 600 pixels per inch (ppi), and you can set the file format to JPG or image PDF. If you choose PDF, however, you lose the ability to see the scan on the display, which means it's generally smartest to stay with JPG format.

Given the software the scanner comes with, the only two scan applications I could evaluate it for were optical character recognition (OCR) and document management. It didn't score very well on either.

More precisely, for OCR, the combination of the scan quality and PageManager did well enough at the narrow task of recognizing text, reading both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake. However, the formatting wasn't even close to the original, and PageManager doesn't let you save multiple pages into a single file. Similarly, the scanner lost points for document management because of PageManager's limitations for converting files to searchable PDF format.

Despite the lack of any photo editing software, I scanned some photos to get a sense of the scan quality. Some came out at roughly snapshot quality, but most were oversaturated to the point of memory colors, like the green in grass, being outside of the range of realistic color. That makes the scans good enough to show what a photo looks like, but not suitable for anything more than that.

Ultimately, the Pandigital Portable Wand Scanner with Feeder Dock (PanScn09) is a potentially useful tool for document scanning. However, all the good points are on the hardware side of the package, with the software?or lack of software?dragging the overall score down. Quite simply, you can't make best use of this scanner with the software it comes with. If you already have the programs you need, it can be an attractive choice. But if you have to buy the programs separately, be sure to consider how much they'll add to the price of the scanner itself.

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