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piQx Xcanex Portable Book and Document Scanner Review
Xcanex is a 7-ounce scan station that magically integrates with your laptop so it’s always right in front of you when needed. No more walking or reaching out to your scanner or searching for it in your bag. It’s the only scanner that doesn’t eat up any of your desk or storage space. It scans not just books & magazines but any document you throw at it. It initiates automatically once a book page is flipped or a new document is placed, as if it’s alive. Perfectly rotated, cropped and oriented scans are saved in your favorite folder without you doing anything else. Flatten commonly found folds or creases in documents using your fingers during capture and they won’t appear in scans. Equipped with a Data Picker that let’s you drag and drop selected data directly into your desired report, presentation, email or searchable PDF archive. Integrated with a Business Card Organizer and Page Manager. OCR Engine powered by the world renowned ABBYY FineReader 10. Output file formats include Multipage PDF, Searchable PDF OCR, Multipage TIFF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, MS-WORD and RTF. For Windows 8, 7, Vista and XP (with SP3 or later only). Mac OS support will be ready end 2013. Supports laptop attachment with depth (or lid height) in between 8.2 ~ 11 inches only.
Price : $269.80
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piQx Xcanex Portable Book and Document Scanner Feature
- Instantly transforms your laptop into a powerful book scanning station! Alternatively mount it on a foldable stand for use with a desktop PC. For Windows 8, 7, Vista & XP (with SP3 or later only) Mac OS support (April 2014 )
- Streamlined design with only 7 ounces added to the laptop gives uncompromised portability. Requires zero storage or permanent desk space.Supports laptop attachment with depth (or lid height) in between 8.2 ~ 11 inches only
- Also scans A4/letter sized documents, business cards, photographs, receipts, glossy brochures or just about anything! Bonus functionality as an 8MP document camera with video streaming and recording.
- Just flip a page or place the document and everything else is automatic - scan initiation, page detection, crop, de-skew, orientate, finger image removal and even file saving to cloud folders like Dropbox!
- Scans of glossy pages have no glare & are immune to ambient lighting disturbances. Allows finger flattening of folded documents & slanted book pages are perspective corrected.
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Costumer review
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Scanner. Exceeded My Expectations
By Ryan Rippee
I have been following the development of this scanner for a number of months. I am a PhD research student, and was in the market for a scanner that would be portable (for trips to the library), and able to scan portions of books and articles quickly with OCR recognition.
The piQx scanner does exactly what it claims. With its automatic finger removal (with tips in the manual for proper finger placement) and the automatic 180 degree rotation for the right-hand pages of books, this scanner will exponentially increase my scanning. Prior to this, I was using my Iphone or Ipad to snap pictures and then manually paste them into a PDF with import into Zotero. Now with the piQx, I can simply save the pictures together as one PDF, and add them to Zotero.
The first scanner arrived with the shutter stuck in the closed position (perhaps due to overseas shipment). I was assured by piQx, that my unit was the first one they have seen with this problem. Their customer support was excellent. They diagnosed my problem with a couple photos taken of the unit, and with daily email contact, replaced my unit at no cost to me via DHL air freight.
The second unit has arrived in mint condition. Even their packaging attests to their craftsmanship. The box is sturdy, the foam in the interior is meant to last more than the unpacking process, and there is even a magnet on the lid edge to ensure that the box will stay closed if you use it to carry your scanner.
All in all, it seems like the ideal solution for a flatbed scanner and a book "wand" scanner in one unit.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Truly fantastic potential, but I don't think it's ready to be out of "beta".
By Knits in Tardis
I've never been quite this glum to give a 2 star review. I love using this scanner, when it works. I want PiQx to have a huge, out-of-control success with this product, and send dozens more manufacturers scrambling to get their own versions to market. (You'll find comparable ones offered on the product's page here, but they are mostly classroom/video oriented, and none can aspire to quite what the Xcanex is positioned to do in terms of document handling, format conversion, image quality, etc. -- not at this price.) But I can't - yet - recommend this product to someone who needs consistently dependable results, or truly speedy scans (there are other process streamlining features that compensate, I must hasten to add - more on that, below), or a not-so-steep learning curve.
For business card and flat page scanning, I will say this little scanner is without peer. Practically anything strictly in 2D is going to come out cropped, lighting adjusted, and ready for OCR, conversion to PDF, or any number of graphics formats. Did I say "ready"? Actually, you can save to PDF format or to an OCR converted format, without intermediary steps. (Oh sure, if you OCR convert heavily italicized, stylized, or just plain tiny text, you might end up with un-decipherable gobbledygook, but that's a limitation pretty universal to OCR readers, last I checked.)
For scanning books, magazines, and other things that bend their way into hard to read text or bizarre images with traditional or "wand" scanners, PiQx has come up with software that they call "Flatpage". Its purpose: To "unbend" or "un-skew" curved and tilted page images and faithfully recreate the look of a truly flat page, without having to cut pages away from the book spine, for one example.
That's a great idea. However, it's not working out so well for me, at this writing. I'm referencing here the original public release of Flatpage, which was made available on the PiQx website on 10/04/2013. Sometimes it works beautifully in automatic or semi-automatic mode. Sometimes it weirdly distorts the page in question. And occasionally, it doesn't seem to do anything at all.
Other issues:
1) The Xcanex can compensate for the glare off of a glossy page, however it does so by means of tilting the scanner stand (or laptop screen) to a particular angle. Together with other variables involved in adjusting the scanner's height, angle, etc., this can be a hugely frustrating experience. Time will tell if it becomes less so with practice, but that's what early experience with the scanner and it's manual has yielded, for me. In addition, images "snapped" using the glossy setting are often dark or "underexposed" - not an insurmountable problem for anyone who owns a half decent image editing program, but I do believe that the gorgeous images shown on Xcanex's own site are the product of ideal, vs. real world conditions, and may not be representative of your results, yada yada.
I would love to post some of my own images here by way of example, and urge Amazon or Xcanex, as applicable, to facilitate same. (Note that "Share your own customer images" is shown beneath the main product image for many, if not most of Amazon's offerings.)
2) The Xcanex is a resources hog. Yes, the bar is always being raised on processing power in computers, but the minimum specs given for systems installing this software are a little, um...optimistic? I was unable to do much with this software on my aging desktop - in fact I had anticipated as much, and getting this scanner was the push I needed to force some much-needed upgrades for my 2.4 GHz Quad Core system: I invested in some memory (going from 3 GB to 8), upgraded from a 32 bit to a 64 bit O.S., changed out the old HD for SSD...short of getting a new CPU and motherboard, I'm not sure what else I could have done to accommodate PiQx's hardware recommendations. All I can say is that I can have a dozen programs open on the desktop and be humming along happily - even when one of them is something piggy like CorelDraw - but if I activate the Xcanex, I need to bring the load on system resources WAY down, pronto. The Xcanex spikes CPU utilization to 100% at or around the start of every scan, and it doesn't cope well with having more than 8 or 10 images "alive" in the thumbnail panel.
Oh, and you know how PiQx touts that you can scan more images while the last image "snapped" is still processing? Not necessarily. For me, second only to Flatpage, forcing the Xcanex to multitask that way is the leading cause of major image distortion.
3) The Xcanex is pretty ergonomic for a laptop (works well in terms of portability and mobile space limitations), but for a desktop...
I tried putting it on a side table. You can't hold a book open at the same time you are trying to watch your adjustments on a screen way over to your right or left, oh, and run the keyboard at the same time. What's a bit kludgy with a laptop is just ridiculous over the more spread-out desktop geometry. My solution is to position the Xcanex on its (included) desktop stand between my two monitors and shove the keyboard off to the side when it's time to start scanning. Obviously this might not work for more space-limited desks, but I think that the convenience of the unit is somewhat lost, at least for a desktop environment, if you have to move and replace the whole scanner/pad assembly on a regular basis.
4) The software is unintuitive. I've given somewhere between 25 and 35 hours, so far, to testing the scanner in everyday use, consulting the manual as I go. I still don't think I know the half of how to get the best image out of this thing. There are a fair number of variables, menu and icon graphics are not particularly helpful, and the interface seems to be very much written for a windows/"touch" environment. Great if you're using it on a tablet, not so much if your screen isn't touch or - gasp! - you haven't yet acclimated to the idiosyncrasies of Win8 or IDevice environments. (I'm kind of good, there, but it's still fairly kludgy software for me.)
At 90+ pages, the manual is useful I suppose as a start-to-finish read, not so much as a "quick start" reference. And really, how many of us devour manuals from cover to cover? I strongly recommend users of this scanner reference the tutorial videos on the Xcanex website.
I can't speak to the video features of this product because I really don't video conference.
Now after all that complaining, I still have to say that I love the potential that is abundantly evident in the Xcanex. It is no exaggeration to say that I have been waiting for this kind of scanner for *years*. Flatbeds are not particularly kind to books and magazines, sheet fed scanners can't accommodate them at all (short of cutting the pages from the binding), and wand scanners like the Wolverine PASS200 Handheld Portable Documents, Books and Photo Scanner are just plain disappointing in practical use. If PiQx can get the financial backing they apparently still seek - check their Facebook page and you'll see that they are indeed looking - I think that the next generation of PiQx scanners, or maybe the one after that, will be A-Ma-Zing. That said, if you don't have an urgent need for this kind of specialized scanner for research or what have you, I'd say wait a few years.
However, if you do have that need, or just a serious appetite for the latest and greatest, you'll find plenty of value in PiQx Xcanex. I find I'm using mine daily, and finally starting to make some small progress towards "paperless" in my own home office.
Negative 3 stars for charging a fair chunk of change for a cumbersome, unintuitive interface, testy hardware ergonomics, and software that appears to be buggy or just not suited to less than ideal user situations. Five stars for innovation, potential and for the amazing things that the Xcanex CAN do, once you've learned to work around the various "hiccups".
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A teacher's (and student's) dream!
By Eric Slay
As a teacher, there always seems to be some kind of weird thing that I need to scan that our regular scanner and copy machine can't scan. In the past I've used my phone, but the lighting is always wonky and the pictures seem to always be askew.
When I saw the piQx Xcanex Portable Book and Document Scanner I knew (hoped!) it would be perfect for me.
Here are my impressions so far:
The unit is heavy and well built. The packaging is just as good. It's smallish, but substantial for sure. I use it with my desktop and it takes almost no room at all on my tiny teachers desk. Installation came and went with no issues. The scan quality is very good. It not only beats my cell phone "scans" but it also beats my old desktop scanner as well.
Now I can scan the results of art projects, etc. that came out well and then use them as samples for next year! My wife, who is also a teacher, has been using it to scan her lessons to Pinterest.
All in all, it works wonderfully, is easy to use, and addresses our needs perfectly!
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