Portronics Scanny 3

Portable scanners come with extremely limited functionality, but the one attribute they actually score well in is - productivity. They’re not exactly mainstream currently and appeal more to a niche genre, but they definitely do deserve more recognition for the feasibility and ease of scanning most of them provide. Here’s our review on the Portronics Scanny 3 – a fast, portable scanner.

Cover

Design and Features
The Portronics Scanny 3 weighs 140 grams with the battery and definitely fits in the 'portable' bracket. It comes in a combination of black and silver and is roughly the size of a large ruler and as thick as two AA batteries put together. The front of the Scanny has an LCD display, with scan and error options next to it that light up depending upon the function. The LCD screen displays the number of files currently scanned with an option to display up to four digits i.e. 9999. The two effects - colour and mono are displayed on the top and the resolution - high or low is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Next to the LCD is the Bluetooth option that lights up or blinks based on connection or transfer of files. The top consists of a MicroSD slot (support up to 32GB) format, time selection and a switch for ON, OFF and Bluetooth. The bottom consists of the rollers to facilitate movement while rolling through pages. The device’s software CD comes bundled with a .JPEG to .DOC converter for quick document conversion.

The LCD screen and scan button is located on the front

As far as features are concerned, the Scanny 3 has an image resolution of 300 x 300dpi by default and high-res mode with a dpi of 600 x 600. It scans images and documents and saves them with the option of a single format - .JPEG and it has an approximate scanning width of 8.5 inches. The focus range of the sensor is 0.3mm, which means the documents to be scanned need to be in complete contact with the scanner. The battery supports scanning of roughly 400 A4 sheets at once on a single duty cycle and the device comes with a rechargeable Lithium Polymer battery.

A quick image scan

Performance
The main performance criteria we checked were the clarity of the scans and the speed of the scanner. In a nutshell, both facets of the scanner are extremely efficient. Colour images took exactly 6 seconds to scan on a high dpi (600 x 600) whilst text documents took 5 seconds. Low dpi (300 x 300) settings got photos, as well as text documents scanned in 4 seconds. The results were extremely fast and pretty impressive too. Files saved with a high dpi obviously have a bigger file size, but definitely have much better clarity than the low dpi pictures. That said the low dpi scanned images are perfectly viewable, too. According to the company the scanning speed for A4 sheets in standard resolution with the mono mode is approximately 2 seconds. Every time we tried to achieve that time, the scanner threw up an error. But four seconds is definitely not bad for a portable scanner.

Errors when trying to scan in a 2 second time interval

A particular thing to note is that via Bluetooth connection multiple files cannot be transferred to devices which might just slow down the whole transfer bit. The only problem we faced was scanning film camera photos as the size was a little too small to get the scanner to scan the image in one go. Also, what we believe was a problem with only our review piece, was that the scanner threw up random errors while charging.

Top view of the Scanny

Verdict
The Portronics Scanny 3 sells at an MRP of Rs. 6,499. It's fast, efficient and simple to use. We'd definitely recommend this for those requiring scanning of pictures or documents on the go. All you need is a flat surface (though our results on a crooked surface were pretty neat too!) and you can have your scanner do the rest. What’s more, there’s inbuilt Bluetooth for quick transfer of data. The only reason we haven’t given it an 8 star rating is its current price and the fact that there was no MicroSD card bundled with the package. If that’s not an issue, then the Portronics Scanny 3 is a definite buy.