Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (PanScn08)

The Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (PanScn08) ($109. 99 direct) has a lot in common with the Pandigital Portable Wand Scanner with Feeder Dock (PanScn09) ($119. 99 direct, 2. 5 stars) that I recently reviewed. It has also some important differences. The most obvious is that it doesn't include a dock, which adds size and weight along with a paper feed capability. If what you need is strictly a wand scanner, with an emphasis on portability, however, the PanScn08 is the more appropriate choice. (And note that it's available in several essentially identical versions, some of which add a pair of letters to the name, after the 08.)

At 1.4 by 10.4 by 1. 5 inches (HWD) and 0. 5 pounds, the PanScn08 isn't as small as the PlanOn DocuPen Xtreme X05 ($369. 99 direct 3. 5 stars) wand scanner, and it doesn't look as much like an actual wand. However, it works the same way, letting you scan by starting at the top of the page, and scanning down in a single sweep. Rollers on the bottom of the scanner make it easy to sweep down the page smoothly and evenly.

Another feature the PanScn08 shares with the DocuPen Xtreme X05, as well as with the PanScn09, is that it scans to memory rather than to a computer. Pandigital includes a 2GB microSD card to save the scanned files to. When you're ready to move them to a computer, you can use the supplied microSD adaptor to plug the card into your computer, or you can connect using the supplied USB cable, let the computer recognize the card in the scanner as USB memory, and copy the files.

Setup and Scanning
Wand scanners don't generally need a lot of setup. With the PanScn08 you only have to insert the microSD card and rechargeable battery, and let it charge for two hours. While you're waiting, you can optionally install NewSoft Presto! PageManager, a document management program, and the only application Pandigital includes with the scanner. The program is limited in many ways, but it includes an OCR module that will let you convert scanned documents to editable text or searchable PDF files.

Not so incidentally, the rechargeable battery is one of the other differences (besides the dock) between the PanScn08 and PanScn09, and it's the one difference in the PanScn08's favor. The only other important difference is that the PanScn09 includes a color display that lets you see a thumbnail of the scans, so you can rescan if there's something obviously wrong with the image. With the PanScn08, you have to wait until you get back to your computer and transfer the files, at which point you may not have the originals to rescan.

Scanning with the PanScn08 is easy. The scanner offers one button to toggle between color mode and grayscale, one for 300 ppi versus 600 ppi, and one for JPG versus PDF format. Simply choose your settings and scan. As with other wand scanners, I didn't have any trouble getting good scans from the beginning?at least, not at 300 ppi. It took a few tries at 600 ppi to learn to slow down to the right speed.

Scan Results
Given the one program the scanner comes with, the only two applications I could test it for were optical character recognition (OCR) and document management. It didn't score well on either, but only because of limitations in the software.

For OCR, the combination of the scanner and PageManager did reasonably well at recognizing text. However, the formatting was so far off the mark that I couldn't even determine what font sizes it managed to read without a mistake. Similarly, the document management score suffered from PageManager's limitations for converting files to searchable PDF format.

Pandigital doesn't include any photo editing software, but I scanned some photos to get a sense of the photo scan capability. Most of the scans qualified as roughly snapshot quality, which makes the scanner good enough for casual photo scanning, but not suitable for anything more demanding.

The Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (PanScn08) is potentially attractive for portable scanning, but is also severely limited by the software Pandigital includes. If it came with a more capable set of programs, as with the Editors' Choice Visioneer Mobility ($199. 99 direct, 4 stars), for example, it would be a much stronger contender. As it is, it earns a recommendation as being worth considering, but only if you already own the software you need or are willing to buy it elsewhere.

More Scanner Reviews:

??? Pandigital Portable Wand Scanner with Feeder Dock (PanScn09)
??? Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (PanScn08)
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