Review of the HP Scanjet Professional 1000 Mobile Scanner

The HP Scanjet Professional 100 Mobile Scanner is portable, fast, and comes with a full suite of scanning software. It's easy to use, though the sheer amount of software included is a bit daunting--it takes some playing around to figure out what each does. The business-card software was very weak. But the scanner's size, USB power, and heavy-duty case make up for this (unless you need a mobile scanner primarily for business cards--in that case, look for other software).

The HP Scanjet Professional 1000 Mobile Scanner is a heavy duty, portable document scanner. It's a bit bigger than the ultra-portable Doxie scanner (which weighs under 11 ounces); it's almost a foot long and only three inches wide, and weighs 1.40 lbs (0.66 kg). It comes with a strong, padded carrying case which looks as though it could withstand some abuse. The scanner is powered solely by the included USB connector.

The scanner is fast (about nine seconds per page in my tests) and the results are very good. You'll need to spend a bit of time figuring out which software you want to use--HP sends along a CD with drivers on it and three more CDs that include Nuance PaperPort, Nuance OmniPage, and NewSoft Presto! BizCard Reader software. Bottom line, you'll be able to use the first two of these to scan into different formats and use optical character recognition (OCR) to turn PDFs into editable documents. The OCR worked well and there was only a small amount of editing necessary. You can scan into a wide variety of file types, from .bmp to .ppt to .xps and everything in between. You can even scan for Kindles.

I wasn't that impressed with BizCard Reader. No matter how simple the card was, each needed extensive editing, which made scanning business cards a chore rather than a convenience. This isn't anything new, but so far only the Fujitsu ScanSoft scanners have been able to get this done properly.

The scanner doesn't come cheap, at about $249, but it's lightweight, seems quite heavy-duty, and for the most part does an excellent job. There's no document feeder for more than a single page, nor are there movable paper guides, but I had less trouble getting pages to load straight than I did with the Doxie. Finally, Mac users note that only the TWAIN driver is included; you'll have to hunt down scanning software on your own.

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