Scanners are one of the most important devices when it comes to transferring physical information to digital information. The value of a scanner depends upon the job that it is trying to accomplish and whether or not it was designed to handle that particular task. For instance, you wouldn’t use a scanner designed to process and replicate beautiful art and photography in an industrial setting that needs to process tens of thousands of scans in a given day. While the high-volume scanner will perform the task, it is not designed to replicate the nuance and color depth of a professional photo scanner.
What Is a Portable Scanner?
Portable scanners are small, electronic devices that allow documents or images to be captured and converted quickly and efficiently to digital format. They are designed to be light and small so that they can more easily be transported from place to place.
The small size and light weight of the portable scanner are as valuable as its ability to process the physical into the digital. They’re small enough to bring on the road. Indeed, some are small enough to put in your pocket.
A Minimalist’s Guide To Scanning
Portable pen scanners are slightly larger than your average fountain pen and can scan the text of a document line by line. Users simply pass the scanner over the text of letters, memos, brochures, magazines or newspapers, at which point it is uploaded immediately and turned into digital data.
Other portable scanners are as wide as a page and roll quickly down the page, capturing the data. Some models will read the text back, which is convenient for users with vision or reading challenges.
While portable scanners are ideal for many purposes, they aren’t meant to capture data in high resolution. This means that they aren’t suitable for scanning photographs or other applications in which a high-quality result is desired.
True Mobility
There are many scenarios in which a portable scanner is an important tool to have on the scene. Consider a drive-through flu and COVID booster shot station, in which the medical staff still needs signed permission to administer the shots. With a page-sized portable scanner, each of those critical signatures is digitized, probably to a cloud-based database, and secured immediately.
If a library was having an event that brought its borrowables to remote locations, a portable barcode scanner and a laptop can effectively create a circulation desk on the spot. As each book is assigned a particular bar code, inventory can be tracked precisely and efficiently, whether books are being checked out or returned.
Portable scanners can be the difference between clean, efficient and timely data entry and a process that entails other steps that could compromise that data. They are as easy to travel with as popping one into your backpack, briefcase or pocket. They also effectively help create a functioning office space wherever you have the internet as you can immediately begin to process your uploads. Visit an office supply website today and check out the newest portable printers so that you can expand your printing options from anywhere.
Image by Lifestylememory on Freepik
Jellybeans in the City 