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IRIScan Mouse

Editorial Type: Review     Date: 05-2013    Views: 3470   





When I first started editing Document Manager back in 1999 (yes, that's right!), one of the first devices I looked at for review was a portable scanner that plugged into the RS-232 port of a PC: the CapShare from Hewlett Packard (I still have it, if any collectors want to make me an offer!)

The idea was appealing enough - swipe a document at your desk, see the scanned image instantly on your screen. But the delivery of the concept was less than perfect: the main problem at that time - largely down to processing power (or the lack of it) - was the clunky 'stitching together' that the device had to do with all the pieces of the scan.

Now nearly 15 years later, IRIS has delivered a far more useable and intuitive solution to the same requirement, and what makes it different from so many other standalone personal scanners is that it is built into an ordinary everyday mouse. It looks like any other three-button USB mouse, but a fourth button (hidden away on the left hand side of the mouse body, where it is unlikely to be accidentally triggered) activates the 300dpi scanner and brings up a scan window on the desktop. Using the scroll wheel while in scan mode gives you an easy and useful zoom in/out feature.

Lifting the mouse off the surface being scanned makes the software skip into 'Edit' mode which offers a range of basic image edit functions: this is sensible enough but can take some getting used to for users (like myself!) who all too frequently lift a mouse during use.

Image editing is rudimentary but efficient: image crop and rotate, adjustment of brightness and contrast, hue and saturation. There's even an eraser tool to wipe out any parts of an image that might be confidential or just not needed.

IRIS even includes its Compressor software which can save any image quickly and easily into a (far smaller) searchable PDF file - quite a giveaway with an entry level device of this nature. Crucially, when compared to early competitors such as the HP CapShare, there is no wait for a 'stitch' of the image to create one finished scan: the user sees the image appear on screen as one image as they swipe the mouse across the document.

Scans once completed can be sent straight to email or social networks, or to the Cloud, or can be pasted as an image or text into other applications. Pasting text (into Word, for instance) activates the IRIScan's built-in OCR, which is as good as we have come to expect from IRIS.

A device like this could easily see scanning widen in popularity among current non-users: when I showed it to my teenagers (both students) they could instantly see the potential benefits.
More info: www.iriscorporate.com

VERDICT
For occasional scanning requirements that don't justify a separate desktop or portable scanner, the IRIScan Mouse is an affordable and perfectly functional alternative. Mobile users are particularly likely to find it appealing, as it means one less peripheral in the laptop bag.

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