This is a follow up to my previous review posts (1, 2) on the Xcanex document scanner from piQximaging. Just a quick one. As you know, I like to complain about everything that doesn’t work perfectly, so this is of course about some more complaining…
But before I start complaining, I also need to say that I have come to appreciate the scanner to make a few scans here and there: e.g. the when I was ripping some CDs the other day, whose covers I could not find online, I just flipped them under the scanner and it was just a matter of seconds until I had the cover image saved with my ripped audio files. Or some of those official letters that you don’t know whether you will ever need them – probably not – but you don’t want to have them pile up on your shelf: I now just scan them, save them in Evernote or wherever, and get rid of the paper copy. I’m starting to think, maybe I would actually spend those 300 USD for the device (mine is a review copy).
But I guess I’d do some comparison work, especially regarding scan quality. In my last update, I already showed illustrated the limits of the device compared to a professional photocopying-machine-scanner, but I’m not sure how the Xcanex would fare when compared to something in the same price range or even with the various smartphone scanning apps out there, which do pretty much the same. But I’ll leave that comparison to others to make (please do tell us in the comments below!).
So, here is what I want to complain about (of course hoping that the developers will fix this in the next software update): I just scanned about 100 business cards that I have collected over the years. The good part is that the scanner offers timed automatic capture (i.e. it does one scan ever x seconds) so you just flip those cards under it, one after the other and it captures them, no problem. But once I had them all scanned, I wanted to drag-and-drop some of the scanned cards from the perfecapture software directly into Evernote. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.
OK, let’s do copy-and-paste then. I tried to select a couple of scans and paste them into an Evernote-note. Well, it doesn’t work either. It only works with single scans. And when selecting a single scan, you cannot copy it with your usual “Ctrl+C” shortcut. No. You have to click on the “copy” icon of the perfecapture software. I think that’s quite cumbersome!
Next problem: after I copied various cards into Evernote, I wanted to delete them from the perfecapture software. At first it worked (or did it?), but now I cannot delete any of the scans. I don’t understand why. Maybe I hit some shortcut that protects scans from deletion? To be honest, I haven’t bothered to check the manual on this (laziness, but also experience that manuals rarely help with these things). Anyway, if this is not a bug, I think it should be transparent to the user why deleting is not possible (instead of the “delete” key just having no effect at all).
So, how do I get this scanning job finished without losing any card by not saving it? My last resort is to save all scans in a temporary folder and then drag and drop them from there into Evernote. So I selected all scans and hit “save”. Well, unfortunately, perfecapture is now asking me for each and every scan to manually confirm the file name. And no possibility to select “apply to all” or something like that. And it takes about a second between the save-dialogues to come up, so here I sit, spending another two minute just to save those scans. Developer fail!
software for scholars 