About.com Rating
The Bottom Line
The Plustek SmartOffice PS282 portable document scanner is a handy and compact scanner that zips quickly through jobs and folds up so it doesn't take up a lot of space. It doesn't come cheap, so at over $300 it competes with Fujitsu's ScanSnap line which comes with the full version of Adobe Acrobat, a great program to have, though the Plustek does come with its own suite of OCR and image-editing software.
Bottom line? The ScanSnap S1500 is more expensive but I think it's the better buy--it certainly had better performance with business cards.
Pros
- Compact
- Fast
Cons
- Weak business-card scanning
Description
- Portable document scanner
- Color CIS image sensor
- 600 x 600 dpi
- Up to 25 pages per minute scanning (at 200 dpi)
- 50-sheet ADF
- Duplex scanning
- From business card to legal size paper
Guide Review - Plustek SmartOffice PS282 Document Scanner
The first thing you'll notice about Plustek SmartOffice compact document scanner is that it folds up into a tiny box that can easily fit in the corner of a desk, which makes it particularly handy for small offices.
After some initial troubles (the first unit I received was inoperable), this portable scanner was easy to get running. The instructions are minimal, however, and there were a few mysteries for me as a result. For example, I couldn't get the paper output tray attached to the unit easily until it became clear that another piece needed to be attached first. Not a big deal but it would've saved me a few minutes of trouble having a diagram in front of me.
The scanner's minimalist design means it has only a Scan button and two arrow keys; you set up functions for the nine one-touch functions via the computer. These include scan to PDF or e-mail, scan to printer or file, and the business-card scanner. The buttons were very easy to configure , though you'll probably have to write which button is which on the scanner label unless you can remember them all.
Like most sheet-fed document scanners, this one is very fast, reading both sides of the page in a single pass. The quality of the scans was excellent, and the optical character recognition (OCR) tests I ran were very successful for most documents, even a few fairly complex magazine pages.
I was less impressed by the unit's success with reading business cards. First, it's not clear how many cards can be loaded, and some cards went through the units slightly askew. The OCR results were, like many card scanners, less than perfect, with logos in particular preventing perfect results. That means you'll end up cleaning up the results of most scans.
The software suite includes Presto! ImageFolio4; Presto! Page Manager; and a business-card recognition program. They're all fine programs, and you can convert scans to searchable PDFs without having to install Adobe Acrobat. If you'd rather use Adobe, go for the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 instead, which comes with a full version.
Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.