It seems pretty incredible to me that I haven’t written about Doxie yet, but here we are. It’s shipping worldwide as of today.
Doxie is, in their words, “the new, modern paper scanner that’s so simple, it’ll revolutionize the way you think about sharing and storing docs and photos forever”. That’s a pretty bold claim! Let’s take a closer look.
Scanner Stuff First
First the normal scanner stuff. Doxie will take a document or photo up to 8.5×14 or A4 and kick out a PDF, JPG, or PNG.
It’s not dual sided and doesn’t have a document feeder, but that is by design. They’ve decided (they say) to focus on making Doxie simple and inexpensive.
Speed-wise, it scans at 12 seconds per page at 200 dpi grayscale.
It uses USB power, so you don’t need to have it plugged into a wall as well. Just plug it into your Mac or PC and you are good to go.
All About The Apps
Apparent (the makers of Doxie) have said that they are keeping the price down by doing almost all of the processing with software instead of by the scanner itself.
To that end, Doxie’s software lets you specify an application to send the scanned files to for further OCRing, processing, etc.
Doxie’s Head Is In The Clouds
You can tell that Apparent realize that a lot of what we do with documents is share them with other people, and they are doubling down on that bet. This thing is built to operate with online services.
In fact, they have taken the (extremly smart in my opinion) move of creating an online service to host your documents so that you can scan a document and it gives you a shortened URL you can send to people. Very smart.
They’ve already set up links to Evernote, Flickr, Google Docs, Picasa, Picnik, Scribd, Tumblr, and Twitter. I assume this list will grow.
Should I Choose Doxie Or Another Scanner?
Come on now, you already know I am going to say “it depends”, don’t you?
Anyways, it really does. With 5 pages per minute and no duplex or ADF, you are probably not going to be running your law office or something on Doxie, but if you are not a heavy scanner user and your main use case is sharing documents or sending them to Evernote or something, you can’t really beat the $129 price tag.
I haven’t gotten my hands on one yet so how about you? Have you tried Doxie? What do you think of the concept even if you haven’t? Let us know in the comments.
