No computer required: The Doxie Go portable document scanner reviewed

No computer required: The Doxie Go portable document scanner reviewed:

The Doxie Go portable document scanner.

Andrew Cunningham

One thing that struck me when I covered Consumer Electronics Week back in June was the amount of paper still being passed around. For all of the tech-savvy people attracted by this exhibition, the most common way for vendors and journalists to swap information was by handing out pamphlets, spec sheets, and business cards. Cover a show for a couple of days and you end up with an unruly stack of paper you can barely jam into your laptop bag, and that's to say nothing of the business receipts that can pile up.
This is precisely where portable document scanners can come in handy. Stick a business card into one, and you’ll quickly have a digital copy that you can use to keep the stacks of paper at a manageable level. The concept of a small, portable document scanner you can connect to your computer isn’t new, but the Doxie Go makes it simpler by eschewing the computer. You can turn this battery-powered scanner on, feed a few documents in it, and turn it off. The scans will be saved to either its internal memory or a connected SD card or USB stick, ready to be copied to your computer next time you're at your desk. Doxie sent us one of these scanners for review—let’s see how it works.

The hardware

The $199 Doxie Go is a 10.5" x 1.7" x 2.2" piece of plastic that weighs a little less than a pound, similar in size and shape to other mobile document scanners like those in Fujitsu’s ScanSnap lineup or Brother’s DSmobile 600. Like the scanners in these competing lineups, the Doxie Go’s maximum resolution is 600 dpi, but it usually defaults to 300 dpi. By my count, it takes about 8.5 seconds to make a 300 dpi scan of a standard 8.5” by 11” sheet of paper, and around 33 seconds to scan the same sheet at 600 dpi. Bundled accessories include a small implement for cleaning the scanner slot, a cloth bag, and a scanning sleeve into which you can place fragile or glossy photos before feeding them through the scanner.
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