Murray Hill
Province
If you’re a road warrior then you’ve probably more than once wished you had a scanner to bring along to scan digital copies of documents. Scanners have come down in size a lot in the past few years, but there aren’t a lot of them to choose from if you travel.
Canon’s imageFORMULA P-150 personal document scanner is one of the new, compact scanners designed for those of us on the go. The Scan-tini, as it’s called, is just the right size to slip into the bottom of a computer bag or backpack, and it has enough functionality to be a valuable asset on the road.
The P-150 makes its mark by being very small, lightweight and offering advanced features for such a small device. It gets power from your computer, however, if you wish, you can buy the optional power adapter. The device doesn’t come with an adapter, and you power it via USB attached to your PC. It’s worth noting that the P-150 only works with a PC, so Mac users need not read any further.
You don’t need to load up any software when using this scanner. The embedded Canon CaptureOnTouch Lite software takes care of getting documents onto your computer automatically — a nice touch. The P-150 is a duplexing scanner — it scans both sides of the document automatically and you’re not required to turn the thing over to scan the backside. Rated at 15 pages per minute in black and white and 10 pages per minute of colour scanning, the P-150 isn’t a slouch by any standards. The quality of output is on par with many other much larger desktop scanners; I used my test version to scan a number of colour documents that needed to be sent to customers, and they were good quality.
Weighing in at just under a kilogram, the P-150 is only 4.1 cm x 27.9 cm x 9.4 cm. It can use either one or two USB connections for power, with the single connection consuming 2.5W, while the double connection consumes 5W of power. It’s a 24-bit RGB scanner (red, green, blue) with auto colour detection and an output resolution from 150 dpi up to 600 dpi. It’ll scan documents from 5-cm to 21-cm wide and 6.9-cm to 35.6-cm long, so you can scan everything from business cards to legal-sized documents. You can also batch scan up to 20 pages, so you’re not stuck having to feed the scanner documents one page at a time — a very nice feature.
The software that comes bundled with the P-150 includes the Canon CaptureOnTouch, CaptureOnTouch Lite, Nuance PaperPort and New Soft Presto! BizCard.
Available now, the Scan-tini has a suggested retail price of $385.
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