Finding a home for all the newspaper clippings, price lists and catalog pages collected on business trips is the bane of executive travelers. But New Jersey-based DocuPort thinks it has the solution: the DocuPen, a pint-sized portable scanner purported to digitize all your widowed and orphaned paper scraps for storage and editing. Having heard that promise before, PROFIT tried out the DocuPen.
Unlike earlier pen-sized scanners, which scan text line by line, the DocuPen allows you to scan whole pages of text or images with one swipe of the scanner. But mastering the DocuPen takes practice. Move too fast, change speed or falter in mid-swipe and the scan is ruined. Also, there is no way to see your scans before uploading them to another computer for viewing, permanent storage or editing in a word-processing application. But once you have it down, the scan quality is impressive. Two resolution settings are available: at 100 dpi, the DocuPen stores the equivalent of 100 8- x 11-inch pages; at 200 dpi, you get 50 pages.
Macintosh users should note the DocuPen won’t work with their computers. Power users will be happy to hear the DocuPen’s four 1.55-volt batteries are supposed to fuel 1,000 scans. If you find you have a thousand bits of paper lying around, you can buy the $300 DocuPen at Staples Business Depot.
