We’ve seen portable scanners before. While the O King Scanner is far from the smallest, it’s desktop-friendly design makes it an ideal option if you’re setting up a temporary office and need to scan scores of pages (like when you’re sneakily digitizing stacks of books from the library).
As far as scanning goes, it’s actually pretty neat. Lay down the included mat, set the contraption’s base on its designated spot, flip up the scanning head and get to work putting page after page of the material you want to digitize. It can capture an entire A4-sized page in one push of a button, making for a convenient way to quickly capture reports and magazine articles.
The O King Scanner actually looks like a table lamp, except instead of a bulb on the head, it comes with a digital camera (1,600 x 1,200 pixels) for taking pictures of whatever’s on the table. The height of the head and the position of the lens are optimized for A4-sized pages, allowing you to photograph an entire magazine page without making any additional adjustments.
There’s no onboard battery for the scanner, so you have to plug it into a powered USB slot to work. As such, it’s ideal for extended desk work (like scanning books), but not for spy missions that have you breaking into private offices and stealing confidential information. Oh yeah, since there’s a camera on there, you can use it to shoot crappy pictures and equally crappy videos, too, just in case you like your devices to have more than a single use.
Brando has the O King Scanner available, priced at $120.
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