Docupen: Spy Gadget? Magic Wand?
If you’ve watched enough spy thrillers, you’ve inevitably seen someone pull out a small camera or gadget and quickly capture documents, then put them safely back and leave with no one the wiser. This is the digital age, and I’m not sure how long this ‘paper’ stuff will last, but it’s nice to see that such a gadget exists and is pretty affordable for all of you spies document preservationists.
It’s called the Planon Docupen RC-800, and it’s a rechargeable, battery powered, color/black/white wand-sized device capable of scanning a page in around 5 seconds… and storing lots of pages in the 8MB of on-board memory. In short, it’s everything those aforementioned spies could want, and it looks much cooler than some miniature camera.
Unlike our previously reviewed scanner, this one can rolls down a page from top to bottom, and is quite a bit faster. Of course, if the paper is uneven, or your rolling speed is too jagged, you’ll end up with pretty poor copies. It can take some practice, but with a few tries you’ll probably be able to it off without too much trouble.
It comes with OCR software, which works as well as they usually do- pretty well, in fact. And we were impressed by the reasonable battery life, the fairly simple controls, and the resolution of the scans (100-400 dpi). Yes, it even comes in multiple colors.
What didn’t work for us was the name- sure Docupen is catchier, but it really is more a Docuwand. Also, the $300 price tag is a little steep- but for those with lesser needs than full color, there are models in the $100 and $200 ranges as well. Medical documents, receipts, even scans of magazines and those darn programs you’ve been saving from every darn school play- they can all be preserved digitally, and you can feel like a spy at the same time.
