A specialist but handy portable scanner
For many years Visioneer has been known for its cheap scanners.
The Strobe 400 is an interesting addition to its range. It's small enough to slip into a laptop bag, power-efficient enough to run from a single USB port on a laptop or desktop PC and capable of scanning both sides of a page in one pass.
The scanner is about the size of a large torch, though more square in shape. It’s reasonably easy to slip into a briefcase or backpack, though it comes with no protective sleeve of its own. At the back it has a USB socket and a separate mains power supply. Most computers can power the Strobe 400 through the USB connection but for those laptops that can’t the mains supply is provided.
It includes two Nuance programs: Omnipage for turning scans into editable text using optical character recognition (OCR), and Paperport for document management, both of which are full versions.
The scanner also comes with Presto! Bizcard for scanning and filing business cards, and Kofax Virtual Rescan, an image-scanning program that can correct scans to improve their quality.
This helps a lot with the accuracy of OCR – our tests showed that the Strobe 400 was able to create accurate electronic copies of pages, saving them as Word or searchable PDF files, among several other formats. It can scan in full colour at up to 600 dots per inch (dpi), which is enough for office use but not for, say, archiving photos.
Being able to scan both sides of a page at once is something usually seen in expensive business scanners so it’s unusual to find it here, and it worked well.
Scanning was quick, but there is no document feeder so every page has to be fed in separately. The software can add multiple pages to the same scanned document file, so it’s not hard to compile a single electronic document from a multi-page original.
Unlike on some models the Strobe 400’s scanning head cannot be detached for scanning magazines or books.
