Slashdot Mirror
Pen-Sized Color Scanner Reviewed
moto writes "ThinkComputers has a review up of a cool pen-sized scanner, the Planon RC800 Portable Color Scanner. From the article: 'I've noticed one major constant about most technology, as it changes it gets smaller. Take scanners for instance, I have a few of them, an older one that is pretty big, you could use it for a computer case if need be, if I lined them up in order of age you would find that they get smaller as they get newer. Today for review I have the smallest scanner yet, it's from Planon, and they actually made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.'"
This is a great way to start moving even further from the paper world. Every one or two-page document you get in class/the office you can quickly scan with a pen, then upload wirelessly to your computer. The day this becomes effective and viable--and the software for converting scanned images to text/pdf/.doc files becomes more accurate--we'll start to see an even greater shift away from traditional documents.
Already, most handouts in class can be found online. This will just make it even easier to keep everything on your computer for easy retrieval--especially through SEARCH (spotlight, google DS, vista, etc.).
Can't wait till they technology is cheaper and more efficient.
This would be useful for those doing research in libraries' historical records. They rarely lend out their older collections, and in some cases won't let them be scanned either. This could be a useful covert way of doing just that.
Actually, "small" and "futuristic" are not necessarily mentally intertwined as you might think.
I remember looking at old futuristic art from, oh, the 30s through the 50s. The future was big. Big buildings, bridges, ships, and later big airplanes and spaceships. Big cars, big roads. I suspect that for the typical person from that period, "futuristic" would be more closely associated with "big" than "small".
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.