Imagine a stand alone scanner about the size of a Monte Cristo Por Delacroix cigar, but 9 inches long.
If you sell in a price commodity market, you know that getting documentation of competitor's prices is a challenge. My favorite story is of a fellow rep who walked into a distributor, casually went to the accounts payable files like he was checking his own invoices, pulled out a competitor's file and started to make photocopies. Second page he jammed the machine and had to ask for help!
Now imagine you see a competitor's invoice sitting on the buyer's desk during a sales call. In the time it takes that buyer to go get you a cup of coffee, you can whip out a scanner, make a copy of the invoice, and have the scanner back into your coat pocket, not that I would suggest such tactics...
The Docupen R700 is just the scanner for that nefarious purpose, and a whole lot of more ethical uses. If you have children who are students, you may never see your scanner again. Taken to a library, it makes capturing research notes quick and easy. Given its extremely small size, it is the perfect scanner for taking on the road with you. My R700 lives in my briefcase and has traveled all over the world. You may need two if you have children, they'll keep borrowing yours for school research papers.
It is about 3/4" in diameter and about 9" long. You press the one button on the scanner, pull it down a page, and it makes a fax quality scan of the whole page. That scan can be uploaded using the supplied USB cable into the supplied PaperPort software. From there it can be converted into text with the bundled OCR (optical character recognition) software, making emailing or editing easy.
The USB cable is also used to charge the scanner. My only complaints are the USB connector on the Docupen side isn't the relatively standard mini-USB, forcing me to carry another cable (which I gladly do since I like the scanner so much). And there is a learning curve to use a Docupen. The key is to pull the scanner at a uniform rate down the page.
At $199, the R700 is one of those "must buy" tools that every road warrior should own. A new version, the R800, will scan in color and cost $299.
Planon System Solutions, Inc., is a leading provider of scanners, scanning services and scanning software. The company is based in Mississauga, ON, and can be reached at (905) 507-3926 or http://www.planon.com.