Review of the Doxie Portable Document Scanner

Doxie is a portable scanner that's great for scanning documents; it works pretty well scanning photographs as well. It was easy to set up and it's quite easy to use (one touch of a button is really the only choice offered). There's little to guide paper as it's being loaded, so there's a risk of a scan being slightly askew, but the quick pace of this portable scanner more than makes up for any minor issues. It's more versatile than the Pandigital Photolink Photo Scanner since it's really made for documents (but still works great with photos), though it is more expensive.

Doxie is Apparent Corporation's newest take on the portable scanner, and it gets an awful lot of things right. That starts with the scanner's very portable size--it weighs in under 11 ounces and is roughly the same size as the cardboard core of a roll of paper towels. Since it's powered solely by USB, it's ultra portable as well.

It also comes in a small package without any CD containing drivers and tons of other software for editing images or creating PDFs. Instead, the drivers are downloadable, meaning you'll always be getting the most recent version. The scanner comes with some stick-on skins, should you prefer your portable scanner to have zebra stripes. And instead of bulking up your computer with more software, Doxie uses cloud-based applications such as Picnik, a free online photo-editing suite of tools. You can also share your photos directly from Doxie on Flickr. If you're scanning documents, you can send them directly and surprisingly quickly to Google Docs.

Those conveniences wouldn't make a lot of difference if the scans were poor, or if the scanner was woefully slow. The good news is that it's fast and the scans are very good. A single sheet of paper takes about 10 seconds to go through (there's no automatic scanning of both sides, however), and only a few more seconds to have your image saved to the computer as a PDF, JPG, or PNG, or sent off to the cloud.

Because of its minimalist shape, I found that it was sometimes tricky to feed pages into the scanner perfectly straight (there's no paper guide except the side of the feeder). So, pages sometimes came out slightly askew. Also, if Doxie is meant to be portable, it would've been nice to have a more heavy-duty carrying case (it does, however, come with a USB cable, which is certainly appreciated).

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.