Introducing the DocuPen: If you frequently find yourself in need of a copier or scanner while you're away from the office, for making copies of contracts, plans, blueprints, etc. you might want to take a look at the DocuPen, which makes it easier to make and store digital copies of anything paper and take it with you. There are, however, a few problems with the pen that make this convenient gadget a mixed bag.

Pros:

• Small, lightweight and portable
  Multiple scanning modes allow you to scan in color or in black and white with multiple quality settings


• Very convenient if you need to scan something now and you're far away from the office


• Expandable memory slot is a good feature if you do a lot of scanning

Cons:

• Not enough standard memory- you can only scan one picture at the highest quality setting


• Saving and deleting images takes a long time - 30 seconds


• Power-saving features make it difficult to download and delete images from the DocuPen


• Pen does not always scan the full page before saving


• No indicator for how much memory is left on the pen

Installation: Installation is pretty simple: pop in the included CD and install the TWAIN driver interface and the Nuance PaperPort software, which gives you a way to download the pictures. Plug in the USB cable, plug in the pen and Windows sets up everything else. Make sure that you plug the pen into a powered hub; the pen won't work properly otherwise. I had everything up and running in two or three minutes.

Scanning With the Pen: To test the pen, I pulled out my electric bill from this past month - it's colored blue (to test the color scanning properties of the pen) and is about the size of a normal sheet of paper (to test the length of a normal scan).

The scanning part is pretty easy: set the desired color depth and resolution and slowly run the scanner down the document. Setting the depth and resolution is a little tricky at first: the buttons aren't marked and the indicator icons on the pen are a little hard to understand without the instruction manual, but it doesn't take long to figure out. There's a red "X" icon that lights up when you're scanning too fast, which is helpful for learning how to control the scanner. The pen is wide enough to scan most documents in one pass, which makes things a little more efficient.

I did notice three problems during the scanning: first, the scanner doesn't always scan the full document before it starts saving. I tried scanning the electric bill several times at several different resolutions and only made a successful complete scan half the time. I have a feeling though, that the problem may be how fast you scan the document - practice with the scanner may decrease the error rate.

Second, the amount of standard memory included in the pen isn't very much - only enough to scan one picture at the highest resolution. If you're going to be scanning a lot of 24-bit images, you'll want to invest in the Micro SD memory upgrades offered by PLANon.

Third, once you scan a document, saving it takes a long time, no matter what the resolution or color depth: the average time was about thirty seconds. I'm not sure why it takes so long to save things, but I could see the long save time being a problem when you need to scan a number of pages quickly.

Downloading the Images: To download the images you've scanned, plug the pen into the USB cable, open up the PaperPort software then click on the scan button to open the TWAIN interface that downloads images from the pen. Downloading and deleting images is simple enough (although it takes a while - again, about 30 seconds), but for some reason the pen is programmed to shut off after every action - even when the pen is plugged in and (supposedly) charging up. Power saving is fine when you're away from a power source, but it makes the pen harder to work with back at your home base.

Once you've chosen which images to download, you can organize them using PaperPort software or any other imaging program of your choice. Overall, the images themselves turn out pretty well - at the lowest quality, it looks you sent the document through a scanner, while at the highest quality the documents are full color and look as good as if you'd scanned them with a flatbed scanner.

Conclusion: Despite its problems, the PLANon DocuPen could be a very useful tool in the right situation, especially if you find yourself doing a lot scanning in remote locations. If it's not something you need right now though, you might want to wait for PLANon to fix the design flaws in the next version of the DocuPen or look for another option.