Most scanners lack portability and versatility. A new 10-in.-long “Magic Wand,” which runs on a pair of AA batteries, stores images to a 4-GB micro-USB chip, has 24-bit color and downloads through a USB 2.0 port and cable, opens up a lot of possibilities for users.
With its 1:1 target-to-scan ratio and its ability to scan at 300 x 300 dpi in low resolution, or 600 x 600 dpi in high resolution, it becomes a potential tool for capturing jpg images to match finishes like tile and wallpaper samples as well as more mundane copies of documents and drawing details.
The $100, 7.5-oz device from VuPoint Solutions Inc., City of Industry, Calif., also comes with optical character-recognition software for converting scanned images of text into Word documents, although we found it less accurate than the OCR capability of Microsoft Office’s OneNote Copy Text From Picture function.
