April 3, 2004 -- Look there! Up in your pocket. It's a pen. No it's a laser pointer! No, it's a scanner! But this is not one of those mild-mannered pen scanners that merely scans a word or a line at a time. This is a full page scanner. Yet it's just a smidge bigger than a pen.

The problem with most pen scanners is that they use the tip of the pen as an optical reader. You hold the pen as you would a writing instrument and move the tip of the pen over the lines in a page you wish to scan. Because of the tiny surface area at the tip of the pen, you are limited to scanning in a line at a time at best. But with the DocuPen from Planon System Solutions, the entire length of the pen is the scanning element. And since the length of the pen is 8 inches, you can scan in an entire page with just one top-to-bottom motion.

For full review please go to:
http://www.computeramerica.com/content/columns/craig/2004/2004-03-08.htm

Craig Crossman is a Knight-Ridder newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers and technology, Computer America, heard on the Business Talk Radio network weeknights at 10PM ET. In South Florida, you can hear a rebroadcast of a selected Computer America show each Sunday evening at 8PM ET on WJNO 1290AM.