Help me choose a handheld scanner

[mrred]

I'm a piano teacher and sometimes students bring new music to the lessons. I'm hoping to find a compact hand scanner that runs on batteries and does not require a pc-connection to make scans (hold the data on flash perhaps?)

This way I can practice a student's music when I get home (after teaching at their house).

Also, I'm sick of destroying the spines of my music books when trying to scan on my flatbed scanner in my studio.

Thanks for any help. I don't even know if such a product exists.

 

[mpilchfamily]

The only portable scanners i've seen are business card scanners.

I'd say your best option is to get as small a scanner as you can find and also start caring a laptop with you.

Another option would be a nice digital camera. Take a nice closeup picture of the document and go from there.

Here is the most portable one i could find but you still need a laptop.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16838113002

 

[Arcanedeath]

a Digital Camera w/ a good macro feature is your best bet in this case.

 

[bruceb]

You need something like this ... http://www.hallogram.com/barcodes/scanners/ds6700/
Not cheap ... you can also get a portable scanner where you feed the page through it,
but this will only work if the music is loose and is within the size range the scanner can take.

 

[lxskllr]

I rather like the camera idea. It's good for copying music, plus it's a camera! :^)

 

[corkyg]

Echo the digital camera idea. Handheld scanners sort of disappeared about 10 years ago. Portable sheet scanners are OK - but sometimes music is not on a flat paper - some scans may need to be from books. The camera in macro mode should work very nicely and you get your complete image as a graphic file.

The problem with handheld scanners was perfect alignment and tracking precisely. The slightest angle or speed variation produced all kinds of errors.

 

[mrred]

Thanks for all the replies.

The linked handheld scanner looks exactly like what I was imagining, but maybe my shaky hands will create uneven scans (it sounds crazy, being a pianist, but my hands are very shaky - almost like early stages of parkinsons even though that is NOT what it is)

Would a digital camera actually work for this? I do have a digicam which used to be pretty high end (an early 8MP sony superzoom). Is there a way that I could convert the pics to pdf or something like that? I wouldn't want all the shading on the page to get printed out, wasting toner.

A sheet scanner is no good because the music is almost always from books.

I'm so disappointed that handheld scanners are not popular like they used to be! I thought it would be the next big thing.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: mrred
Is there a way that I could convert the pics to pdf or something like that? I wouldn't want all the shading on the page to get printed out, wasting toner.

You can open the .jpg in Open Office, then export it as a .pdf

 

[corkyg]

And post processing can easily convert the color image to B&W.