Review: Iriscan portable scanner

Iriscan is a portable A4 scanner about the same size and weight as a bar of Toblerone. 

Minimally styled you’ll find no switches or buttons on the unit, simply a powered USB connection for the PC and a slot for paper. You control it through the Read Iris Pro 9 software supplied, with includes calibration and quality settings along with OCR (optical character recognition).

Read Iris Pro is a software package in its own right, so we won’t say too much about it here. You’re in safe hands though; it’s one of the leading scan management and OCR applications around, offering you plenty of options for controlling how your scanner behaves with impressive OCR capabilities.

Scan times are around 10 seconds for black and white and just over a minute for a full colour A4 page, so you won’t be waiting long.

Quality is pretty good as well, showing accurate colour representation for images and sharp lettering for text. This is assuming you take enough time to get the best out of the product because, like a four-year-old child with a sugar high, it needs to be kept under constant supervision.

Quite often you’ll need to encourage the Iriscan to pick up a page by nudging it gently to get things started. Also when you get about half way through there is a tendency for the page to wiggle its way to the end, rather like an oversized backside trying to find a comfy spot on a new sofa.

As a result, images are often skewed, and while there are options to improve this in the software, it means the scanner isn’t really suited to creating documents that can be used in a professional capacity.

Considering the software by itself should cost around £70, the £85-ish asking price for the scanner is a bit of a bargain. The Iriscan is handy and portable, fine for day-to-day conveniences, but a little too sensitive to produce the sort of results you can be proud of.

Also consider:
Plustek Opticard 820 portable scanner
Not a bad photo scanner, but it's business users who'll get the most out of the Plustek Opticard 820

Planon Docupen R700 Portable Scanner
Pricey, but great for scanning pages of text away from your computer

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