BYTE.com > Conference Coverage > 2006
CES 2006: The "Real" Day 1
By Jerry Pournelle
January 6, 2006
(CES 2006: The "Real" Day 1
: Page 1 of 1 )
It's 4:00 PM on the first official day of CES--and I'm already on information overload. There's too much to see, and it's a bit overwhelming. Much of it is yet another, but it's yet another wonder, yet another product that we only dreamed of ten years ago, and now these miracles are competing on price and color.
Last night I went back to my room in the Circus Circus (good enough although not my favorite place; alas I left off making reservations until it was too late), and tried out one of the products I collected at Winston's Cherry Picks earlier yesterday. This is the color version of the PLANon Docupen Scanner. My first experience with the black-and-white version of the Docupen wasn't pleasant, but that turned out to be in large part because I didn't understand how it worked. The new version comes with much clearer instructions.
The Docupen is a stand-alone scanner, with enough internal memory to hold a number of document pages (how many depends on the resolution you select). It's about the width of a page, and scans a whole page very quickly. The idea is to carry it with you, use it to scan documents--they used it to scan my business card, for example--and later connect it to your computer for document transfer. In use it's more like a camera than a conventional scanner. Transfer is through a USB port, but alas, the connection isn't standard and you have to have their special cable. They say their designer recommended the special cable on aesthetic grounds. My view is that designers are easy to replace; there's a reason for standards.
Otherwise though the Docupen works quite well. File transfer, particularly of high-resolution documents, is quite slow, but it can be done at leisure, and the color is astonishingly good. More on this in the column, but it looks good on first look.
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