Portable and Compact Scanners

Portable and Compact Scanners

One of the essential elements of any office is a scanner and photocopier , enabling people to make multiple copies of their printed documents and images. But what happens if you want to be able to make copies of things while you're out of the office? That's where portable and compact scanners come into play.

It may be that you can't take the item into the office, or you simply need to be able to make copies of things while on the move. In which case, a portable scanner is ideal. Or if you don't have a lot of space to store a larger scanner, a compact version could be just what you need.

Types of portable and compact scanners

One major use for a portable scanner is to scan business cards and credit cards, for example when you are working away from the office and want to capture relevant information to send it via email, maybe for accounts record keeping purposes.

Different types of portable and compact scanners will come with different functionality. Some come with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, for example, which enables you to not only create a duplicate copy of scanned text, but also convert it into a digital version that you can then alter (unlike a simple photocopy, which is essentially just a picture of the copied image).

Some portable scanners are very small, being based on the idea of acting a bit like a pen, so you can run the scanner over each line of text individually, recording each word as it goes along.

There are even portable and compact scanners that come in the shape of a computer mouse . So you have the dual purpose functionality of being able to use it as a normal mouse, as well as then being able to run it over a document to scan the contents.