Hewlett Packard C6301C Capshare 920 Hand Held Scanner

• Scan and store up to 50 copies and view them on the LCD screen
• Connect via infrared to your laptop, hand-held PC, or infrared printer
• Capture over 100 pages on a single charge
• Lightweight and portable--fits easily into a briefcase
• 1-year warranty

HP has never really known who to market this device to. I do legal and real estate research and when I first saw a co-worker with this device, I knew I had to have it. It was just beginning to sweep the courthouse where I work when HP discontinued production. The price has sky-rocketed for a used device as this little toy can literally double your productivity if you are out in the ''field'' making copies. Mine paid for itself in the first 3 months and I have had it for 3 years.

Buy Hewlett Packard C6301C Capshare 920 Hand Held Scanner Now

I must offer some comments here, since... myself, I could not figure out why Hewlett Packard stopped manufacturing this very clever and productive item. The answer is: "high resolution digital cameras". There is no longer any reason to use hand held scanners, which were made before reasonably priced digital cameras became available. Therefore, I give the Capshare one star, as clever for its time, but now an obsolete artifact, useful only for museum displays. Or possibly, at this current asking price of $550, has the legendary HP Capshare become a collectors'' item?

And there were several drawbacks to using a Capshare, which a camera will overcome. I purchased one of these Capshare devices, which I wore out, literally. (The electrical contacts of the buttons went intermittent.) My Capshare could capture a grey-scale (black and white) bit map image of a page, and transfer the image through its infra-red (IR) port to my Windows98 Ricoh Magio netbook, which would OCR the image with HP''s bundled software, at 98% accuracy. Amazing technology, for its time! However, a complete Capshare scan of a page required a minute or three, with some manual dexterity. Scanning was similar to running a squeegee around a window. You needed to make one continuous motion that moved the Capshare''s narrow, four inch wide scanning head over every part of the paper page. Scanning a curved surface was impossible. The paper needed to be absolutely flat, to make close contact with the scan head. Any hesitation in movement, or a bump from a wrinkle or speck of dirt, would lift the head and terminate the scan. The required pressure would come close to tearing a thin sheet of paper. If the entire page was not scanned in one serpentine sweep, the Capshare''s firmware would not be able to "stitch" the convoluted scan back into the original image of the printed page. You were required to capture a contiguous area of a page in only one scan, with no option to merge more than one scan of the same page. And that software processing time to "stitch" the image back together, could amount to twenty to forty seconds of waiting. And then, to conserve memory, some manual button pressing might be needed, for preliminary trimming of the image, inside the Capshare. That consumed more time, working the buttons, guesstimating the page margins, on that tiny screen. In contrast, a digital camera can capture the image of a page, in an instant, and in color, both text, photos, and diagrams. Software is now capable of correcting any keystone distortions in a snapshot, and saving both photos and diagrams along with the OCR''d text. The Capshare was only gray-scale, and it could only capture crisply defined text. Any photos or line drawings, even if in black and white, would be saved in a Capshare''s memory as indecipherable, pixilated blobs. If you work where you might need images of diagrams, go with a digital camera. The HP Capshare was clever for its time, but only a partial solution to the problem of capturing text AND photos, with line drawings and diagrams.

On YouTube, there are some fascinating videos of robotic machines that can digitize a book, automatically, at a fairly fast pace. The book is held open, at an angle slightly larger than 90 degrees. Each page is turned with pneumatic blowers and grippers. When the pages briefly stop moving, two digital cameras, each focused on a different page, snap photos. For three dimensional objects, there are other devices and software that make it possible for a camera to photograph the label or artwork wrapped around the circumference of a bottle, or a cylindrical work of art, and OCR any text.

Handheld scanners are history! Or can anyone suggest a purpose that I have overlooked?