HP's CapShare 920 (HP Capshare 920)

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Product:	HP Capshare 920
Date:	02/07/00 (230 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Light; portable; easy to use.

Disadvantages: Prohibitively pricey; limited to monochrome scans.

Students, attorneys, and road warriors, listen up: With HP's CapShare 920 scanner, you'll never have to tear articles out of books again. This portable device packs a scanner, memory, and an LCD screen into a package roughly the size of the original Walkman, allowing you to capture passages from printed articles for later use. But unless you're constantly mobile, this scanner's high price and performance quirks make the machine more trouble than it's worth.
Toy or Tool?
The $499 CapShare 920 fits easily in a jacket pocket or a briefcase, and its curved, rubberized top feels comfortable in your hand. The front of the CapShare features a small black and white LCD for viewing captured pages, as well as a handful of convenient buttons for scanning, navigating, and transferring pages to your PC. You can easily send pages to your system via the IrDA or serial port, and the unit even includes a serial cable. The CapShare also ships with rechargeable batteries and transfer utility software.

To scan a document, press and hold the scan button, then slide the small scanning surface around the edge of the page in a rough square. The CapShare takes care of stitching the scanned image together and automatically runs its OCR software on text. You'll need a little practice moving the scanner at a consistent speed and following the recommended scanning paths for different document types, but once you have the hang of it, the process should take only seconds.

Scans à la Mode
The HP offers three capture modes for storing different types of pages: Normal for text pages, Graphics for pages with graphics or pictures, and Flip Chart for storing oversized pages. Unfortunately, normal-sized text becomes illegible when scanned in Flip Chart mode. The device stores nearly 50 text-page scans or about 10 to 15 image-page scans.

We found transferring documents via both the infrared and serial connections to be a generally str
aightforward process. The CapShare will even send captured articles to a Windows CE handheld, a palm-size portable, a Psion handheld, or the Nokia Communicator.

The CapShare's main hang-up lies in the inconsistent way it handles scanned pages. In our evaluation, we had to scan certain paper types, particularly newsprint with bends or wrinkles or glossy magazine print, several times before we obtained legible results. Pristine corporate documents and reports scanned without a hitch, as did books, which is good news for the users most likely to benefit from the CapShare: corporate road warriors and students who do lots of book-based research.

The rest of us are likely to see the high-priced CapShare as an intriguing curiosity that fails to offer enough bang for the buck. But if you have the need and the means, the CapShare may be just the portable scanner you're looking for.

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