Zcan+ - Portable Scanner

With the month of May being National Photographic Month, what better time to scan that box of photos. With digital cameras, then Smart Phones available for years to take photos and have them on your computer right away has been great. But never overlook those treasured photos from just a few years ago before digital and certainly those heirlooms of photos you inherited. Getting them in a digital format which can then be stored on a CD / DVD disc, on an external hard drive or in ‘Cloud Storage’ will safe guard those images. Even if you protect the photos of sunlight, heat, cold, etc they can and many times do fade, somethings so bad the image is lost.

There are multiple methods available to scan these images. Using the older method of the big flat-bed scanner hooked up to the desktop / laptop computer is one, but there are also portable scanners. The wand or hand held type is one way to scan each photo even the larger ones. Most of those wands also come with a dock the wand fits in so you don’t have to hold the scanner but rather just insert each photo – which is super easy.

 

Another newer type of scanner is the Zcan+ from Canada. This is similar to the computer mouse and you can scan photos, documents, records, magazine / book pages, Bible pages, just about anything you could place the scanner over. You can scan to Windows or Mac programs. It can be ordered online and cost $85 in Canadian money which is equal to $77 in United States dollars. I haven’t tried this Zcan+ but if it anything like the wand, it would be easy to use and you get high quality images, 400 dpi. You click on the top button, scan the item then press that button again again – complete. Images can be sent as email attachments or placed on Facebook ot Twitter pages.

A good feature is convert — OCR (Optical character recognition)printed text to text in a computer document you can edit. It doesn’t matter which language, it has 199 languages it can recognize. Another interesting activity you can do with any scanned image, see if there is anything similar using ‘Google Search’ on the Internet – might just learn some new interesting information.

Whichever method of equipment used, make that a project — scan those treasured photos and documents.

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