SAN FRANCISCO (02/01/2000) - If you've ever wanted to digitize photos, business cards, or documents while on the road, you're a good candidate for a portable scanner. Until now, portable scanners have been so hefty that you had to think twice about taking them along. But two new shipping products--Antec's $149 Attache Personal Imaging Device and NEC Technologies' $149 PetiScan--simplify the decision making. Truly designed for travel, these units are the smallest, lightest color scanners we've seen, though they excel at different tasks.
The sleek Attache, which resembles a three-hole paper punch, weighs only 12 ounces and fits easily into a briefcase. The PetiScan weighs more (21 ounces) and is about the size of a small cigar box. Each is easy to set up, but the Attache draws power from its Type II PC Card interface, while the PetiScan's power comes from its USB interface. (If you plan to use an external USB hub, it must have an A/C power plug to provide enough juice for the PetiScan.) Both units have an optical resolution of 300 by 600 dpi and can scan various reflective materials.
Both models also come with Presto PageManager, a basic document management app.
For more advanced image editing, such as applying special effects to photos, the Attache offers Presto ImageFolio, while the PetiScan supplies the equally competent and easier-to-use Adobe PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 3.0. Only the Attache comes with an OCR application, which seamlessly converts text and tabular data into an editable file. Each scanner provides its own TWAIN driver.
But here's where the similarities end. The Attache is a sheetfed scanner, so you can't scan anything thicker than a single sheet of standard or glossy photo paper. Also, if you don't put the sheet in perfectly straight, the image will be skewed and the sheet may become mangled. With practice, however, your feeding skill will improve.
In contrast, the PetiScan operates like a miniature flatbed scanner; simply remove the cover if you want to scan very thick material. Unlike the Attache, the Peti-Scan has a handy scan button to jump-start the scanning process. The PetiScan does have one critical limitation: Its maximum scanning area is just 4 by 6 inches per scan. You must scan larger images in pieces and then use PhotoDeluxe's image stitching feature to reassemble the picture digitally (a separate app is bundled for use with Macs).
Overall, the Attache was the better performer. We scanned a number of photos and text documents with each and found the Attache generally faster than the PetiScan--twice as fast in some cases. At default settings, the Attache also typically produced sharper images with greater detail (in shadow areas, for instance) and more accurate color than the PetiScan did. By using the PetiScan's broad selection of advanced image controls--for adjusting hue, saturation, and the like--we produced scans that were closer in quality to the Attache's scans.
If you do a lot of OCR work in the field and every ounce counts, the Attache is clearly the scanner for you. But if photos and other images are your top priority--to e-mail or post on the Web, for example--the PetiScan's design and robust editing software make it a better bet.