Apparent Corporation, makers of IntelliScanner, has added a re-priced, academic version of its Doxie portable USB-powered document scanner called Doxie U. with the same features as the consumer version. Both the consumer and education versions are low-cost, lightweight, single-page document scanners designed for quick and easy scanning to PDF format and optional upload to a number of cloud services, including Evernote, Flickr, Google Docs and several others, or simply saving PDFs to disk.
The academic version is available for $119 — $30 off the retail price — but requires academic credentials to purchase. Multi-page documents can be scanned one at a time and saved to a single PDF. The scanner also supports saving to PNG and JPG, and can handle receipts, notes, photos and most other paper-based documents. Apparent Corporation also offers a free “Doxie’s Cloud” web-based storage service for documents scanned with Doxie, making it easy to make scans available to others (each upload returns a shortened URL for sharing).
OCR can be accomplished by scanning to PDF and submitting the PDF to Picnik or another service that handles PDF-to-text such as Google Docs. Files can also be saved locally and directly to apps such as Picasa, iPhoto or Lightroom. The product also supports Apple’s iBooks, Adobe Acrobat, Dropbox, YoJimbo, Scribd, Tumblr and other services. It can scan up to 24-bit color at up to 600dpi. It can scan up to 12 pages per minute (at 200dpi grayscale) and handles up to legal-sized paper up to .75mm thick.
The distinctive hearts on the case design (the largest of which is a multi-function button) can be augmented with optional “skins” including zebra print, and is matched with software for Mac and Windows that sports a cartoon “Doxie” mascot to guide new users. It weighs 11 ounces, and requires either OS X 10.5 or higher (Mac) or Windows XP or later.
