Well bottom line is that if it’s used for what it’s designed for, and used how it’s designed, it works as expected.
The two issues I see with it is there’s about an inch of housing to either side of the wand (not edge to edge) that keeps
it from being close to the spine.
The second is that it has no real ability to scan hovering above a page or not directly on the page. The reason is two fold.
A. The rollers on this particular device actually activate a burst light when it moves. No motion = no light.
B. When not directly on the page, the image is blurry and smeared all to hell.
So my next course of action is to get some glass and maybe a mirror, see what can be done with that.
Otherwise, I’ve only messed with JPEG at medium (600dpi) and hi (1050dpi) and the scans are usable.
There’s a bit of a crosshatch or almost like a texture effect in the solid areas of color if you zoom into the resulting
pictures, but hi level scans at 8MB for a book cover are really nothing, and scaling down the image for web removes
that anyway. PDF might be different, haven’t tried. Scan speed I’m going slow (to me), but I’m faster than a flatbed, haven’t had a smeary image yet when I was using it properly.
Color reproduction is fair to good. Certainly web usable, but I wouldn’t use if for color print reproductions without some tweaking against the source. The same could be said of flatbed scanners, albeit to a slight less degree.
For the $42 I paid for a $80-120 stick, I think it’s worth it for the functionality it offers. It’s a one trick pony, but that’s all
it ever promised to begin with. Supposedly I can get several hundred to a thousand scans on a 1 GB microSD card, and the built in battery will last a few hundred on it’s own. Don’t know if the 1.3 tft screen is worth it, probably not, you really can’t see squat for the previews on it. The extra 140dpi in high mode over the next model down is probably kinda sorta worth it though.
It does offer a scan direct to computer mode, as well as ABBYY FineReader 10 (should sound familiar to some of you), and a cloud app if you want to do that. Otherwise PC hookup just sees the memory card as flash storage and you can pick files right off the card.
Edit – Trying it with some heavy plate glass, just produced non-useful mostly blurry images. Probably find some thinner scanner bed glass before I call it pointless, but not looking good.
