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It’s certainly a nice feature to have, but one we think most laptop owners can do without. Some include built-in batteries, so they can operate in a truly wireless fashion: no USB cable, no power brick, not even a laptop. Most scanners today can run on either USB or a typical AC adapter, so if you want to travel light, all you need is a USB cable. Diverse power options: The fewer accessories you need to carry with your scanner, the more portable it is.Speed: The best portable document scanners operate at around the same speed-about 25 pages per minute-but all else being equal, we prefer a faster one.Any model around 3 pounds or less is okay in our books. Although machines with ADFs tend to be on the heftier side, we think a feeder is important enough to make the extra pounds worth it. Portable document scanners actually span a broad range of sizes and especially weights-from under 1 pound to well over 3 pounds. Portability: It’s right there in the name.With an automatic document feeder (ADF), you can slide the whole stack into a slot and let the machine work its magic. Automatic document feeder: Speaking of large documents, you don’t want to stand there and feed your scanner dozens of pages one by one.The feature also reduces wear and tear on both the original documents and the scanner itself.
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Duplex scanning: Being able to scan both sides of a two-sided document in a single pass drastically reduces the amount of time it takes to scan large documents.Being able to run your scanner without a USB cable is a nice perk, especially if the scanning speed isn’t any slower. Wi-Fi: Just a few years ago, Wi-Fi was a rarity in portable document scanners.Ideally, a good scanner accurately recognizes every character, but realistically we expect a success rate of above 90%. The best portable document scanners can also export the text as an editable document, either in DOC, RTF, or TXT format.
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OCR: A good portable document scanner should be able to accurately recognize printed text via optical character recognition, or OCR, and turn it into a searchable PDF.
#Best portable printer for mac software#
The hardware interface needs to be easy to navigate, and the desktop and mobile software should be powerful enough to get the job done but not so complex that it gets in your way when you’re working under pressure.
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