PlanOn SlimScan SS100

The PlanOn SlimScan SS100 ($139.99 direct) is nothing if not physically attractive. Picture a gadget with a stainless steel case the size of a credit card, and not much thicker, with the shiny silver interrupted by a 1.2-inch color LCD and just five small black control buttons. Unfortunately, the software side of the package doesn't work as well as the hardware, relegating the SlimScan more to the status of an impressive toy than a useful scanner?for now at least.

PlanOn has introduced a variety of surprisingly small, highly useful products, including the PlanOn PrintStik PS910 ($269 street, 2.5 stars) printer and the PlanOn DocuPen Xtreme X05 ($369.99 direct, 3.5 stars) scanner, with additional, similar, models of each also available. What all of them, including the SlimScan, have in common is an emphasis on small size. The DocuPen scanner, for example is about the size of a baton or magic wand.

The SlimScan is essentially a smaller version of the DocuPen scan element in a case that's about the size and shape of a stack of four credit cards. In both cases, the scan element is along one of the long edges of the scanner, along with rollers. To scan, you start at the top of the page, business card, or receipt, then roll smoothly down in one sweep.

What in large part makes the DocuPen scanner so attractive is the combination of small size and the ability to scan an entire page in one sweep with little to no learning curve for getting a good scan. What works nicely for scanning a page with the DocuPen, however, doesn't work anywhere near as well for scanning a business card with the SlimScan.

Scanning
You can get a feel for the problem with scanning by using a credit card as a stand in for the scanner. Put a business card flat on a desk. Then hold a credit card with one long edge along one short side of the business card about 5 to 10 degrees off the perpendicular, and sweep the credit card across the business card.

If you try this without holding the card down, sweeping across will tend to move the card. If you hold the card down with your fingers, they'll get in the way of sweeping across the entire card. One solution is to tape the card down to hold it in place, but that's an inelegant workaround at best. A potentially better choice is to put the card in the kind of plastic sleeve that some sheet-fed scanners come with to protect photos, but PlanOn doesn't supply a protective sleeve. The company says it's considering adding one, though.

Not so incidentally, receipts don't generally have the same problem. There's usually more white space around the text than with a business card, leaving plenty of room for you to hold the receipt down without interfering with the scan.

Recognizing Text
Unfortunately, there are other problems beyond the simple mechanics of scanning. After a couple of dozen attempts?more of a learning curve than I'd like?I was able to get decent scans, at least to the extent of my being able to read the text on screen. However, the SlimScan?s program for managing receipts and business cards utterly failed to read any of the text correctly, much less parse it into the right fields.

The results were so poor that I contacted PlanOn to find out if I was doing something wrong. Part of the problem, it turns out, is that you have to scan at a surprisingly slow speed to get good enough scan quality: 1 second per centimeter, or 2.5 seconds per inch?a critical piece of information that isn't mentioned in the scanning instructions, but is hidden instead in an appendix in a PDF file stored in the scanner's memory. PlanOn says it's aware of this oversight and intends to correct it with the next printing of the quick start instructions.

Armed with this information, I rescanned a selection of cards at the slower pace. Indeed, the recognition improved, with at least one or two fields on each card getting filled in properly. Unfortunately, the accuracy still wasn't enough to save any time over simply typing the information into Outlook.

To eliminate scan quality from the equation, I asked the PlanOn representative to send me some scans to import into the program, and then compared my results with his. Even with his scans, I didn't see any obvious improvement. I also didn't see the same level of accuracy that he was reporting. It turned out that he had a later version of the program, which might well make the difference. Even with the accuracy he said he saw, however, it's clear that the program isn't a match for, say, the latest version of NewSoft Presto! BizCard when it comes to recognizing text and putting it in the right fields.

Other Issues
With the SlimScan doing so poorly on the two central tasks for a self-proclaimed receipt and business card scanner, it almost doesn't matter what else it does well or badly. However, there are several other issues that demand mention.

The scanner itself doesn't seem to be fragile, but the protective cover for the scan element is. The cover includes spring loaded plastic clips that can break easily, as I discovered roughly 90 minutes into the scanner's lifetime. PlanOn says it's aware of this issue and is looking at alternatives to the cover as it currently ships. On a strongly positive note, the company says that if it settles on a better solution, it will make it available at minimal cost to anyone who already owns the scanner.

Another issue is that the setup and calibration instructions aren't quite right. I was able to muddle through the installation, but for calibration, I had to call PlanOn to get the right steps. As with the oversight in the instructions about scan speed that I've already mentioned, PlanOn says it will address these issues in the next iteration of the instructions.

Ultimately, the PlanOn SlimScan as I received it is simply not ready for release into the wild. A lot of the issues I saw grow from poor documentation, which can be fixed easily enough, and which PlanOn says it will indeed take care of. But even after those issues are fixed, the OCR accuracy in the software version I received for testing was short of the level it needs to be to make the SlimScan truly useful, and the program itself is cumbersome to use. For the moment, the SlimScan is on a par with the wonderful dancing bear, where the wonder is not in how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all. I look forward to seeing a later iteration of the software, with the hope that PlanOn can turn this bear into a much more graceful dancer.

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