Portable Handheld Scanner

This is a portable handheld scanner. Think of it as the guts of any standalone image scanner that either glides from left to right or top to bottom (depending on the scanner model). It allows the user to scan the contents of any books, letters, recipes, bank statements, receipts and much more by gripping the the scanner in one hand and gliding it smoothly over the surface of the page (don’t worry though, you won’t have to go at a snails pace – images can be scanned very quickly at around 4-5 seconds). Though instead of having it constantly hooked up to a PC while you scan your various images and text, the portable handheld scanner houses a microSD card slot in which you can connect an SD card and copy those images and text directly from the page and download them to the card memory. Note also that many of these portable handheld scanners hold an internal memory of around 8mb

The scanner pictured is able to capture these images up to 8.5 inches by 50 inches in length and is also capable of capturing data at either high definition at 600dpi or standard definition at 300dpi then store them as standard jpeg files to your chosen destination folder.

To then transfer the images to your computer, you can either take out the microSD card and connect that to a card reader and then attach that into your PC, or attach the portable scanner itself to the computer via a USB cable and simply drag and drop the files as needed.

These type of scanners will work with all the top operating systems at present including Windows 7, Vista and XP. They’re also pretty light (around 2lbs) but this varies slightly between scanners, they’re durable and many are generally powered by AA batteries or a single Li-Ion battery that can be charged via USB for about 180 scans.

Similar portable handheld scanners are available from here which usually come with carry cases, manuals, software, USB cable and a quick start guide.

As you might expect, prices can vary greatly from around as little as $75 to over $300 due to either extended battery life, added features or the quality of the images scanned.