Review on Efficiently scan on the go with Canon ImageFORMULA P-215II Mobile Document Scanner by James Cypert

I bought this little scanner hoping to digitize my home office and photos . I found the initial setup quite challenging. There are no instructions on how to actually operate the thing in the box, and a lot of googling doesn't help either. Besides, who still mails anything with a CD? Anyway, once I figured out that all you need is a cable connecting the scanner body to the laptop (don't use an AC adapter), it was fun finding the firmware on the scanner. I'm assuming my laptop has a setting that doesn't allow programs to start automatically, since I had to find the scanner, open the scanner's folder as if it were an SD card, and launch the program from there . The actual program looks like it was written in 1995 and it didn't look good on my Windows 10 laptop. However, I was able to find the buttons to scan and test a few things. This works well for letter-size paper and black-and-white documents. I haven't tried it with legal documents so I'm not sure it can handle this size. I tried scanning multiple pages at once and it was a bit annoying. If you've had stacks and stacks of scan paper, you might find it tiresome to fiddle with it all the time. It scanned double-sided documents really well, but you need to set this up before scanning, and the interface isn't the easiest to find the options. The quality of the photo scan left me wanting and that is ultimately the reason I returned it. Initially, everything defaults to scanning to PDF, and the option to save the image as a .jpeg is just a few clicks away in the settings, which isn't very user-friendly. The quality of the scanned photos was also not good enough for me. I kept seeing those thin white lines in the scanned images and not in the original photo (max resolution is 600ppi btw). I haven't noticed these lines on black and white documents either, so I'm not sure why they keep appearing when scanning in photo mode. Also, the scanned photos kept getting slightly crooked as the scanner fed them, and there was a weird gray area in the scanned image where the image wasn't scanned. I used a photo that I wouldn't worry about losing, but after that I wouldn't want to try to scan old or fragile photos. So overall good for documents but not for photos in my opinion. The device itself is quite small and would be nice if you had to be mobile with it. Power comes from the laptop/computer you plug it into, which is nice (fewer cables). However, considering the price and, in my opinion, insufficient quality of the scanned photos, it is not worth just scanning paper.