VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Jr. PDS-ST510-VP

Not too surprisingly, considering the similar name, the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Jr. PDS-ST510-VP ($100 street) has a lot in common with the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST415-VP ($100 street, 3.5 stars) that I recently reviewed. Both are portable scanners that scan without a computer. As the Jr. in the name implies, however, the PDS-ST510-VP is even smaller and more portable than the PDS-ST415-VP, which means that if you want to minimize what you have to carry as much as possible, the PDS-ST510-VP should be high on your list of possibilities.

At 0.9 by 6.6 by 1.2 inches (HWD) and weighing less than 4 ounces, the PDS-ST510-VP looks less like a magic wand than like a long, thin candy bar. That makes it the right size and shape to easily fit into a shirt or suit pocket or into a handbag. Whatever it looks like, however, it works much like both the PDS-ST415-VP, which also doesn't look like a magic wand, and the PlanOn DocuPen Xtreme X05 ($369.99 direct 3.5 stars), which does.

All three scanners work essentially the same way, letting you wave your magic wand, or, less poetically, roll the scanner, over a scan target. In each case, the sensor and rollers are on the bottom of the scanner. To scan, you place the scanner at the top or side of a page, and then sweep down or across. The scan gets saved to memory, and you can move it to your computer later. Connect the PDS-ST510-VP by the supplied USB cable, let the computer recognize it as a USB drive, and copy the files.

What's the difference?
One big difference between the PDS-ST510-VP on the one hand and the PDS-ST415-VP and DocuPen Xtreme X05 on the other is that it's a lot smaller. More precisely, with a scan element only a little wider than 5 inches, it's not wide enough to scan an entire letter size page in one sweep, the way the PDS-ST415-VP can. Instead, you have to scan the page in two or more separate scans that you can optionally stitch together later with stitching software. Note too that you can scan originals up to 5 by 53 inches in one sweep.

Using the software is optional in more than one way, since VuPoint Solutions doesn't even ship it with the scanner. Instead, the manual (which consists of one printed fold-out page with small type) gives instructions for where you can download free stitching software from Microsoft, the Microsoft Image Composite Editor.

Unfortunately, since the software isn't under VuPoint Solutions' control, there's no guarentee that Microsoft won't change the address, so the URL in the manual won't work, or even that the program will remain available as a free download. If you have any other photo stitching software however, it should work just as well. You may also choose to skip stitching software altogether, and keep the separate scans separate.

Setup, Scanning, and Recognizing Text
As with the PDS-ST415-VP, there's not much to set up with the PDS-ST510-VP. It comes with a rechargeable lithium battery already installed. Simply charge it, insert a microSD card, and you're ready to scan. Be sure you have a card handy however, since the scanner doesn't come with one. According to VuPoint Solutions, you can use cards with up to 32GB of storage.

Scanning is easy. Simply roll down or across the page. Given that you can't capture a full letter-size page at once, sweeping across is probably the better approach for single-column text, since it will capture full lines. For multicolumn text, scanning a column with each sweep will generally make more sense. Either way, as with the PDS-ST415-VP, there's no learning curve. I got acceptable scans starting with my first try, both for recognizing text, and for scanning photos well enough to scan an article, for example, and get recognizable images of any photos.

The PDS-ST510-VP also comes with the same software as the PDS-ST415-VP, Abbyy Screenshot Reader, an OCR utility with a limited ability to translate images of text into editable text. Screenshot Reader recognizes text showing on screen, and it can recognize only as much text at once as can fit on the screen. To use it with the scanner files, which are in JPG format, you open the file on screen, and then tell Screenshot Reader to recognize the text.

Depending on your screen resolution, you may need to recognize a letter-size page of text in two or more pieces, which may lead you to decide that there's no good reason to stitch pages together. In my tests, using a 1280 by 1024 screen resolution, I got the best result with a 300 pixel per inch image by zooming Photoshop to 66 percent, so the text fit just within the screen width. At that size, I had to recognize each page in three sections.

At smaller zoom sizes I could recognize more of the page, but the accuracy dropped. At 66 percent zoom, the program read our Arial test page at sizes as small as 8 points, and our Times New Roman test page as sizes as small as 10 points, without a mistake. At 25 percent, the largest possible zoom size for showing a full page on screen at once, it couldn't read any size text sample for either font without a mistake.

Other Issues

One other issue with the PDS-ST510-VP is that you can't see if you have a high enough quality scan until you look at it on a computer, at which point you may no longer have the original available to rescan. However, you can't count this too heavily against the scanner, since the same limitation applies to most scanners that can scan without a computer. One the few exceptions is the Editors' Choice Visioneer Mobility ($199.99 direct, 4 stars), which lets you scan to a smartphone so you can see the results.

The best argument for the PDS-ST510-VP is its portability. Other handheld scanners, including the PDS-ST415-VP and DocuPen Xtreme X05 will scan faster, by letting you scan more of a page in a single sweep, but they won't fit in your pocket. And while the Visioneer Mobility will let you see your scan results on the spot, it's bigger still.

I'd like this scanner a lot better if it came with internal memory or included a microSD card and also came with its own stitching software?which is to say, there's room for improvement. But if you want a scanner you can carry with you literally every day to quickly scan articles, receipts, notes, business cards, or anything else you want a record of, the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Jr. PDS-ST510-VP can certainly do the job well enough to make it worth considering.

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