Compaq Scanner/Keyboard

I've always been wary of products that combine two pieces of equipment into one unit. Two dedicated products usually perform better than a single combined system. The Compaq Compatibles scanner keyboard does, however, execute both its jobs adequately.

I was glad to see that no compromises were made in the keyboard quality. Key depression is solid with a responsive spring back, allowing extended typing without subjecting your wrists and fingers to strain. The unit is slightly larger than an average keyboard, but not excessively so.

The scanning mechanism is situated at the rear of the keyboard with the rollers feeding in the page just above the function keys and ejecting it through the rear of the unit. This limits the logistics of your desktop. It isn't possible to position the scanner keyboard in front of the monitor as the paper needs clearance for ejection. This cancels out any benefits in terms of space.

Scanning is performed by simply inserting a sheet into the feeders. The supplied PaperPort software starts automatically, the page is scanned in a matter of seconds and displayed as a desktop thumbnail icon. The image can then be viewed from within PaperPort which provides basic tools such as zoom and rotate, or it can be inserted into a linked application. On startup, PaperPort looks for programs that can be linked to it, like word processors, spreadsheets or image viewers.

MS Word, Paint and OmniPage were all automatically linked. Paint Shop Pro, however, wasn't.

Resolution ranges from 100dpi to 400dpi with a depth from 1-bit to 8-bit greyscale, although there are some useful preset configurations. The default setting is 'article', used for scanning magazine cuttings and printed pages. The letter setting is for a better quality text scan, specifically for OCR. Bizarrely, the article setting gave better OCR results than the letter setting, making nine mistakes with a dummy OCR page as opposed to 13.

Two preset image scanning settings are available. One's high quality with a longer scan time creating a large file. The other is for medium quality with a faster scan time and a smaller file. The resolution and depth can also be set manually, but the presets can save you time if they suit your needs. The quality is adequate and the major uses of a unit like this would be OCR with the occasional image scan.

The Compaq scanner keyboard is fairly good at what it does, but at £234 it's much too expensive. A colour flatbed scanner can be bought for around the same price, offering more versatility and better quality. Even the two in one idea has limited appeal since everyone will already have a keyboard. The scanner keyboard is an interesting idea but its performance doesn't match it's high price.

Author: Riyad Emeran