As I’ve mentioned before I love photos and I use a lot of tools for adding photos to my collection. I use the Flip Pal and the Zcan+ as well as my Canon scanner. Both the Flip Pal and the Zcan+ are available at Shop the Hound.
Many of you are familiar with the Flip Pal which is a portable scanner that uses 4 AA batteries and it weighs about 1 lbs. The beauty of it is that it’s a stand alone product which means you don’t have to take your computer with you to Auntie’s house to scan the photos you can just take your Flip Pal. You can scan at 300 or 600 dpi (your choice)and it’s transferred onto a SD card, similar to what you have in your camera. You can scan your typical 4×6 photos but should you want to scan something larger then that’s the beauty of the Flip Pal, you can flip the Flip Pal over, take off the lid and scan the item in sections and then with the stitching software that’s included on the SD card you can stitch it back together. The stitching software is easy to use and I’m not just saying that.
One of my newer tools is the Zcan+ which is a mouse scanner. It isn’t a stand alone product you do need your computer to use it. It works with both Apple or PC and it scans at 400 dpi. What makes it unique is that it has OCR (optical character recognition) so it recognized characters on documents in 199 languages. I’ve attached a short video of me using my Zcan+ (it’s my first video so please be kind :)).
Which do I prefer? Well I’m glad that I don’t have to decide because each of them has their special features it all depends on what your needs are.
Hi Ellen – looks like a great product – does it scan words and pictures at the same time? Can I use it with my IPAD Air. Do you need to crop it before you save it or can you save and crop later? Thanks (from your 5th cousin !) 🙂
Hi Brenda, You can scan words and pictures at the same time but would only be able to really use the the jpg and png. If you want to edit something that has both text and a photo it would be better to do separately. At the present time you can only use it with your PC or Mac. As for cropping; you can do it either way, when you scan or later. Thanks for asking and I’m hoping that soon we’ll be able to figure out where our families connect. 🙂