Manual-feed scanners have the advantage of being portable and simple to use, with Pentax's DSMobile 600 being one of the better additions to this competitive market.

A USB connection is the source for power and data transfer, which makes it convenient to use with notebooks. Since it draws power from a USB source, there is not big, clunky AC adapter needed. Its weights less than 12 ounces and measures about 11 inches wide, so thats about as portable as you can get while being able to scan documents, business cards and more.

A control button on the scanner acts as a shortcut for loading the DSMobile software, but you can specify other applications as well. The nice thing is that it works with most software, and you can even save scanned documents automatically as PDF files or the more robust Pagemanager 7, which keeps track of all your scanned documents and makes it rather easy to edit, print and email.

The Pentax DSMobile 600 scanner's performance is good. The scan times are between 10 seconds to about a minute, depending on the resolution and color of the document. With an optical resolution of 300 dpi, the quality of the output you achieve is decent. However, don't expect high quality portrait quality with this scanner, because its not intended for those purposes.

One feature we really liked is the OCR recognition software, which can convert scanned documents to editable text. This can come in really handy, especially if you're on the move. Another feature we liked is that it consumes very low power in comparison to other similar scanners, ranging from 0.2 watts to a maximum of 2.2 watts. This can help you preserve valuable battery life and reduce overall electricity consumption.

You do have to be a little careful when lining up the document to feed it into the scanner, otherwise it won't pull properly and the scan won't be good. Overall though, the feeding mechanism is smooth and the quality is quite good.

As for maintenance, Pentax promises nearly maintenance-free operation due to the unit having very few moving parts. Even though we haven't fully verified this, it seems that overall customer feedback is very positive and the unit seems to be pretty reliable in many of its users' experiences.

We feel that this scanner is a good investment for the money, based on positive customer feedback, convenience, portability and reliability it offers.

>>> See Lowest Price on the Pentax DSMobile 600 Scanner

• Only 12 ounces and measuring just 11 inches in length
• User-friendly sheet-fed design
• Optical Resolution: 600 dpi
• Scanning Modes: 48-bit internally, outputs 24-bit true color; 8-bit gray scale; 1-bit bi-level B&W
• Operating Systems: Windows Vista, XP, 2000, ME SE, Mac OSX 10.3 and later (download from www.pentaxtech.com)

Technical Details

• Brand Name: Pentax
• Model: 206700-501
• Hardware Platform: PC
• Scanner Type: Sheetfed scanner
• form_factor: Portable Unknown modifier
• scanner_interface: USB Unknown modifier
• color_support: Color Unknown modifier
• media_size_maximum: Legal (8.5 in x 14 in) Unknown modifier
• Color Depth: 48-bit color
• Maximum horizontal resolution: 600
• media_type: Plain paper Unknown modifier
• Media Load Type: Manual load
• Minimum system requirements: Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition, Apple MacOS X 10.3 or later, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows XP
• Width: 11 inches
• Depth: 2 inches
• Height: 1.5 inches
• Weight: 12.2 Ounces