The Xerox Mobile Scanner is rather more
special than your usual grey lump of scanning plastic. Its sculpted exterior
lets it stand out from the crowd and, at 638g, it's a good deal lighter than
the likes of the Canon DR-C125 and DR-M160, too. More significantly, the Xerox
offers a few extra features that make it portable in a way its rivals aren’t.
The battery-operated Xerox can be used in
almost any situation, all without a PC. It's rated for 300 scans, which is
plenty of scanning time before the juice runs dry.
Xerox
Mobile Scanner
A 4GB Eye-Fi card is included. This neat
device doubles as both storage card and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi adaptor, allowing you
to connect to a PC via a wireless network. In Direct Mode you can wirelessly
connect the Xerox to a laptop even if you don’t have an available network.
This being the age of cloud computing,
Xerox is keen to allow you to send your files through the ether, and you can
wirelessly divert scans to sites such as Evernote, Picasa, Shutterfly or
Facebook. The device can also communicate with most mobile devices, and an
Airplane Mode button allows you to switch off the Wi-Fi radio.
For traditionalists, or those looking for
the most reliable connection, the Xerox can be hooked up with a USB cable. We
found the Wi-Fi erratic in our tests.
The trade-off for portability and
connectivity is an absence of features such as an ADF. You must insert one page
at a time, which makes working with large documents a chore.
A button on the scanner lets you cycle
through different output formats, and the process of feeding in pages is
convenient. Insert a new page within a few seconds of the previous one, and the
Xerox will automatically add each page to the existing document, rather than
create separate files. High-volume users should look elsewhere, though.
The
Xerox works best as a text scanner. Its 300dpi resolution is limited for
detailed graphics, although it should prove sufficient for web-destined
content.
The software bundle is well designed. Nuance's
PaperPort takes care of the general organisation, while the excellent OmniPage
Pro 17.0 works very well for OCR.
The Xerox works best as a text scanner. Its
300dpi resolution is limited for detailed graphics, although it should prove
sufficient for web-destined content.
As a text scanner, the Xerox is extremely
adept, and it turned most of our test documents into PDFs without problems.
Business cards were accurately reproduced, too.
Xerox’s speed claims held up well in our
tests. It claims the Mobile Scanner reguires 10 seconds per page, and we found
sheets took no more than 11 secs over USB 2.0.
If you want to take advantage of the
wireless, you can expect it to take almost a minute to complete a scan. We
preferred to stick with USB even when a wireless connection was available.
Verdict
Most users will find the Xerox Mobile
Scanner's wireless too slow to use on a regular basis, although there may be
times at which it comes in handy. If you have only the odd document to scan,
the portable Xerox should prove an attractive and convenient product. Hunt it
down online and you may well be able to improve on our quoted price of $254
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Details
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Price
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$306
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Contact
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xerox.com
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Specification
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A4 sheetfed scanner; 300dpi; 24bit
colour; single-sheet feeder; 4GB Eye-Fi card; 802.11b/g/n; USB 2.0; mobile
device compatibility; battery lasts 300 scans; 70x293x51mm; 638g
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Build
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4/5
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Features
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4/5
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Performance
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4/5
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Value
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4/5
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