In most of our scanner reviews, we refer to the manufacturer’s speed rating and then test the device to see if it can match or exceed its rating. This is not possible with a handheld stick scanner where the user determines the appropriate scanning speed.
Even so, how fast should you try to scan an A4-sized page with the Book 7? Ayers quotes the top A4 speed for Book 7 as 4 seconds when set at 300dpi, 7 seconds at 600dpi, and 11 seconds when set at 1,050dpi. Ideally, you’d scan a page a little slower than that. However, I found that even scanning at half that speed produced satisfactory results.
(Credit: Erkan)
To scan a page, you are instructed to place the document or photo on a flat surface. Hold the scanner target firmly. Press the Scan button once to start scanning. A scanning status icon will appear on the LCD screen to indicate that the device is ready to scan. Simply slide the scanner from the start line to the end line. After that, press the Scan button again to finish the scanning process.
If your scan speed is too fast, you’ll see a red dot on the scanning status icon, indicating that you should try again. After the scan is complete, you’ll see a small version of it on the LCD, which can give you an initial indication that you were successful. Because the screen is quite small, you won’t be able to see if the focus is off or if individual elements are missing. If you don’t scan smoothly, you may have lines that are steep or long due to the unevenness of the bottom movement. Also, if you scroll horizontally down the page, your scan will be similarly distorted. Errors like these will not only affect the appearance of scans, but they can also dramatically increase the error count of the software’s OCR output.
This requires a steady hand, and you should expect to spend time following the manual scan process. In testing, I got better at it with each scanning session. Bound books can be especially difficult, as you may not be able to lay them perfectly flat without damaging the binding. In theory, you could scan both pages of small books with a single swipe of the scanner. In practice, this can cause the words closest to the center of the book to be slightly out of focus. I found it best to scan both facing pages separately, in this situation.
How good is OCR? Using the Readdress PDF app, I was able to convert a scanned text scan to editable text at 300 dpi without errors for both my Times New Roman and Arial test pages. These are the same results we got from the Redress app when testing the Book 5, as well as several other portable scanners we’ve tested.
When your scans show no visual anomalies, you should consider these results a best-case scenario. When my scanned pages showed a significant squiggle, scratched or elongated lines, or missing characters, the OCR error count increased significantly. Or put another way, if you’re not able to easily scan a page by hand, you won’t have an accurate OCR result. I was able to quickly correct some of their mistakes when I was only slightly off the scan. With scans that were way over the mark, correcting so many mistakes was more trouble than it was worth.
