Consumer Reviews

Due to the small size of my desk (and my need for minimal clutter) — that served as my basis for looking for a scanner with a small footprint. My needs other than that were minimal; I wasn’t planning to scan photos or negatives, so actual pixel-by-pixel color accuracy wasn’t a big concern. So having size as my primary restriction, I was left with only a few choices. Among them, it was primarily between Fujitsu and Neat Receipts. The form was considerably more expensive, and the latter, although in the same price range, seemed to lack in the usability department (from others’ reviews).

As for the actual real-world usage of the Pentax DSmobile 600 scanner, I must say it’s been a great addition to my gadget collection. My documents generally scan pretty fast, get directly saved into a PDF, and I’m done. I’ve had no need to use the OCR functions yet so I can’t comment on those. But as for the size (small), and the lack of clutter (only 1 USB cable going to my computer) — the product just fits the bill.

One thing that I have noticed is that since the paper is fed through by rollers, there have been instances where one size of the paper is fed into the scanner first, causing a mis-aligned output image. That’s not much of a problem since it can be remedied by scanning it again, but it is sometimes frustrating when you are in a hurry to get something scanned and are naturally getting lazy about feeding the paper into the scanner optimally.

I have hundreds of articles, reviews, and other articles that rip out of magazines for later use. I have kept them categorized in file folders but I’m tired of the space they consume. We already have a flatbed scanner so I started scanning some of them to PDF. It was not even worth the hassle. I looked at a highly rated scanner that has a document feeder and has a version especially made for the Mac, but it is $500. No way.

Having looked at all of the less expensive scanning options I went with the DSmobile 600. All I can say is, fantastic. I had read all of the reviews from Mac users and understood that you need to get the driver from the Pentax site. It was that simple. In fact, the CD that comes with the unit is essentially worthless for Mac users. Just ensure you have some image capturing software, install the Mac driver from the site, hook up the scanner, select the scanner in your image capturing software, and start feeding the scanner.

You can select the scanning quality, whether you want black/white or color, and then it’s just a matter of working out what is best for your intended use. There is an OCR option which I don’t use but tried it once and the results were rather impressive, but the page I scanned was mostly text so that is kind of expected. Sometimes it takes a little bit of work to get the page to actually feed into the scanner and sometimes they get a little mis-aligned, but with it being such a quick process it wasn’t frustrating to redo it. And that didn’t happen that often. Otherwise, the feeds are quick and doing multi-page articles is painless.

I use Yep! to manage and scan PDFs and it worked flawlessly in the set-up of the TWAIN driver, finding the scanner, and then giving great options for converting the scanned images into PDFs. With Yep! you can also assign your own metatags which are then easily searchable either in Yep! or using Spotlight. A very powerful combination. With the cost of hard drive storage so cheap nowadays, I just have all of the PDFs going to one folder and it will be more than enough for my entire collection for extremely efficient searching and perusal over the years. I consider the DSmobile and Yep! to be the perfect solution to my needs.