Planon Docupen RC850

The Docupen RC850 is a compact handheld scanning device that can scan images and text at an impressive resolution of up to 600 dots per inch.

It’s powered by an internal battery that was fully charged (using the same USB connection through which it attaches to the computer) in a few hours.

Using the Docupen is a case of selecting the required resolution and colour setting, then slowly swiping it over the material to be scanned.

The first thing we noticed during our testing was that the Docupen’s tiny 8MB of internal memory was barely enough for a single high-quality image so upgrading this, using a MicroSD memory card (not supplied) that fits into a slot on the pen, was a must.

The device also switches itself off after each image is saved to memory, which quickly became irritating when doing multiple scans. Unfortunately, image quality was disappointing.

In high-quality colour mode, scanned magazine pages appeared muddy and dark and the slightest hand-shakes during the scan resulted in distorted images. Black and white text quality was also poor.

The Docupen works, but not as well as it should.