Review on Highly Efficient VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Portable Scanner - PDS ST415 WM by Robert Blanton

Pros: - Small and portable. Battery life from two cheap IKEA alkaline AAs seems decent. It is fully compliant and requires no driver installation, it simply writes files to a microSD card and then works like a standard card reader when connected to a computer. The Bad: - It's very poor at dealing with even slight creases or creases on what you're scanning. Even if it's a perfectly legible piece of paper unrolled from a standard business envelope, the resulting image will have some imperfections. I tried to fix this by buying a small clear acrylic rectangle to provide a flat surface to scan, but this resulted in a blurry image rather than a corrupted one. The copier's default transparency helps a bit when trying to scan a small object like a receipt. - There is a large dead zone at the edges of the scanner, making it unusable for scanning pages from books of any size. - Hold both scanners and what you are scanning, trying to move the scanner at the same speed along its entire length can be impractical. This can be helped by using a surface with some traction. In summary, the concept is pretty neat, definitely not the worst technology I've ever used, but for practical reasons I think I'd just invest in a standard flatbed or auto-feed scanner for now.