The Docupen Rc800 – Highly portable and highly advanced document scanning

Pen Scanner Technology Scans an Entire Page in 4 Seconds. The size of pen yet weighs just 1.75 ounces and is only 8.5 inches long.

The Docupen Rc800 series including the DocuPen RC805, DocuPen RC810, and DocuPen RC850 is a high tech and highly useful color handheld scanner from Planon. You can scan almost anything such as books, articles, photos, magazines, passports, receipts, catalog, literature, contracts etc! And then transfer the results later, as TIFF graphics files or typed text which is fully editable to your PC via a U.S.B. cable. You can avoid having to retype material with the Docupen. It can be likened to a pen scanner, but excepting portability, there’s much difference.

Not your Usual Pen Scanner

Usual pen scanners work similar to highlighters. Pen scanners are usually pen shaped and scan only with their tip, where they have a scan element. With them, you need to scan one line at a time and often must rescan, if you make errors, which are highly possible. It is highly inconvenient and tedious to scan large quantity of text or whole pages with them. The 9 inch Docupen however, innovatively involves a electronic eye across nearly its entire flat edge length. To scan any document with a Docupen, you need to first place the Docupen scanner flat on any object to be scanned, parallel with the text and then sweep it down till the bottom of the page in one full sweep. This allows you to scan pages very quickly. The Docupen is a mobile device and an inbuilt lithium ion battery allows you to perform document scanning anytime, anywhere and transfer the results to your PC later. Highly portable and a fit in your pocket, the Docupen will let you scan books and documents conveniently without having to tote around heavy machines for OCR scanning and OCR conversion.

Great design and utility

Rollers situated above and below a Docupen’s scanning element let you sweep smoothly from the top of a page to the bottom easily, while keeping the Docupen parallel with the page’s top edge. Other good design elements include a button that lets one switch between 12-bit and 24-bit true color and black&white color modes and another button, which lets one cycle between low resolution (100/200 ppi), and high resolution (200/400 pixels per inch). Status lights with unique icons indicate the various different modes. According to Planon, 40 true-color scans can be done per charge of the battery or more, if you only do monochrome scans. The 8 MB of memory in-built holds two full-page color scans or 100 pages of black&white text. You may upgrade the storage using a memory card. Later, at your convenience, you can connect the Docupen to a PC to view results of document scanning already performed. The battery automatically recharges through the USB cable when the Docupen is connected to a PC. Around 35-40 scans can be done per charge. The Docupen takes around 5 seconds to scan a page and can scan color documents and also photos. Scanning can be done in standard color, high 24bit color or black and white.

OCR at your fingertips

It fulfils the need for convenient and fast out of office document scanning. In order for the scans to be transferred to a computer, you must install Docupen’s PaperPort software and Twain driver and connect the Docupen to your PC with the USB cable included. PaperPort clears the scanner’s memory after transferring your scans. Planon’s software provided for Mac/Windows is enough to capture documents snapshots to be stored in the form of TIFF graphics files. However if you want to convert scans into editable typed text, I.E to get your PC to perform O.C.R., you must install the PaperPort program. It is good at manipulating and organizing scans, and has inbuilt OCR software, which is easy to use for OCR scanning and OCR conversion purposes. It can send text that has been scanned directly into a single Microsoft Word file.

Not perfect, but very good

But the DocuPen has its faults. Firstly, the object you’re scanning needs to be flat. Bound books for example, are therefore hard to scan. Also, it’s not possible to scan something wider than 7 inches, which is the width of the scanning eye. O.C.R. accuracy isn’t great and Photo scans are rather murky and oversaturated. Docupen performs best with a flat surface, a steady hand and lots of practice. Docupen also requires some time to perform a clean up of it’s translation of your text.

The Docupen is priced at $299 and comes with a protective leather case and you can choose between seven different colors. Docupen professional is a version of the Docupen, priced at $309, which comes with the excellent PDF and OCR conversion plus scan to word software, ABBYY FineReader Sprint. It converts images received from fax, scanner or a digital camera into editable/searchable formats. It accurately retains layout and formatting of documents and also supports a large range of output file formats and recognition languages. The Docupen RC800 is a great choice, if you want a highly portable document scanning and OCR conversion solution.