KickStart Friday - A Scanner for your smart phone with Scandock
If you have worked with scanners over the years, you understand the nature of connecting them up to a PC. And the issues with getting the configuration set up so that things worked as expected to make a copy of a document can be a challenge. Once your scanned document was on your PC, you could use other tools to work with your copy. But in today's world, everything has become so mobile and hooking up a scanner to your mobile devices is not something you can do. Sure there are scanners which have computer functions in them which can scan you document, but you still have to send that to your computer to work with them. Something for the mobile world is what we need.
That is where Scandock comes in and is a recently funded KickStarter project. They are promoting this as the post-PC scanner, but it is really a non-PC scanner. It does not require a computer, unless you look at your smart phone and see that as a computer. The Scandock unit has a place for you to place your iPhone or Android smart phone into and that becomes the scanner engine. With the Scandock app, your phone has everything it needs to perform the scanning operation. The smartphone technology has improved the megapixels on your smart phone so that it can take a high resolution picture and obtain a great starting pointing for document capture.
And that capture is showing great color capture as well. With the specially designed ScanDock scanner, you get LED lightning which adds to the process by providing light across the entire surface. None of the surface of the unit is going to reflect light or create glare. Once you have your scanned document on your smart phone, you can move it to the web or print it to an AirPrint printer. These are printers attached to a Wifi network. Technology has come together to provide for a great way to move away from the old fashion scanners to a new way of doing things in our mobile world.
While the Scandock scanner looks to be the big value, it is actually the Scandock app which they are going to be providing which has all the power. With that, you can take your phone with you and actually do a scan of a document. The difference is going to be in the quality of the scanned image. The Scandock device has a color bar on the unit which the app uses to perform enhancements on the scan and make it visually much better. You will not get that feature when just using your smart phone to scan something.
We have noticed an earlier version of a ScanDock from as early as 2009 which looks like the early stages of the product, but from Kyle A Koch. We have to assume that he is either part of the new version or sold the rights to this for what we are currently seeing. This was a cardboard version for the iPhone.
While the Scandock is designed to work with the iPhone, there are limited Android devices which they have tested with. Those include the Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Note and HTC One X. That leaves a huge number of Android phones in question as to whether they will work with the Scandock. The Scandock scanner is planned for a release in April this year and pricing for pre-orders looks to be $480.
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