Review on Highly Efficient VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Portable Scanner - PDS ST415 WM by Brian Dildine

I bought this for school because I'm afraid of losing important documents that I need later. The ability to scan without being connected to a computer is very convenient. Even scanning at the lowest resolution produces sharp images of black and white handouts, taking about 2 seconds to turn the pages. At the highest settings you do need to slow down the scrolling a bit, taking 5-7 seconds per scan, but I found that I only needed high settings for the smallest text (and color of course). However, it doesn't recognize the edges of the paper, so you might end up with scans that need cropping to remove edges that will scan fine on the table you've been working on. It doesn't really matter to me, but if you need more professional scans for a presentation or whatever, you might want to consider this. I don't want to scan 100 things and edit each one to remove it. The device itself is very portable, in fact it's the same width as my MS Surface Pro so it easily fits in the tablet case I use for the Pro. The scanner comes with a case to protect it. My only criticism of the scanner is that you CANNOT connect it to a computer to see the scanned image immediately. You need to scan first, then mount and then it will work as a removable disk with the files listed. So if you're scanning a lot of pages, instead of viewing them all on one PC, you'll have to wait and do everything later. The included software is useful but not perfect. It converts JPG scans to Word, Excel, PDF and emails, but cannot do anything with PDF scans. This may be a limitation imposed by Adobe or a trick for you to upgrade to their Pro version ($90 at the time of this post), I'm not sure. As I see, the Pro version gives you the ability to convert PDFs.