PLANon DocuPen RC800

Lets start with something straightforward, a vellum receipt. These are usually gas receipts or ATM receipts, and if you leave them in your vehicle, the ink magically disappears in a very short time period. Now I’m not the type of person to keep every single gas receipt, but if you travel for a living and have to account for every drop of petrol this could be a money saver should you arrive at the office with a handful of faded and blank gas receipts.

Now you can retain all that proof with the DocuPen, just scan each receipt as you get it, then upload them all at your leisure. Naturally as soon as I decided this would be a good practical test, I couldn’t find an old gas or ATM receipt, however I managed to rescue a Krispy Kreme receipt from my glove box.

The first scan, seemed to abort 2/3 of the way through, and I suspect I was moving the DocuPen too slowly. The second scan, I upped the Docu-Quality to the highest, which resulted in colourful banding of the page, the third scan, Docu-Quality, standard res, yielded the same results as the Docu-Quality lowest resolution.

It may take some toying with the settings to find the best combination of resolution and colour mode.

Similarly practical and intuitive, is to scan a newspaper article. Here is an article from The Onion. I apologize if any copyright issues are stomped on here, but all press is good press.

As you can see there is a great deal of difference between the lowest setting and the highest, everything in between is shades of these two greys, if you’ll pardon the pun. However, that being said, BOTH scans are readable, and take into account this is scanned from newsprint which is not a medium known for its clarity in the first place. In fact you could say the lower resolution image is actually more accurate since the higher one is pink and blue, where the paper itself is just white and blue.

Next test is something also true to the DocuPen’s original purpose, a page from a book. And not just any book, one of my favourites, it’s a regular size hardcover copy of Jack McDevitt’s Chindi¹.

As you can see below, I had to scan the page sideways so as to get as close into the spine as possible and even then, I couldn’t quite get close enough without actually breaking the spine of the book. This poses a problem, as this seemed to be a natural choice for the use of this scanner.

Once something is scanned sideways it is very easily rotated in any direction using the PageViewer software.

¹ McDevitt, Jack. 2002. Chindi. Ace Books. New York. ISBN 0-441-00938-7