Doxie Flip Review – More Than A Document Scanner

There’s been an interesting trend lately: document scanner companies are starting to come out with scanners that can scan more than just paper. Sure, you can scan photos with most document scanners, but how about fabric? How about Beyblades?

These scanners come in the more high-end variety, but I’ve recently received a review copy of a really fun scanner called the Doxie Flip[1].

The Doxie Flip is a tiny little flatbed scanner with a 4×6" glass scanning surface. It is cordless, running off 4 AA batteries, and can scan paper, photos, and pretty much anything else that you put on (or under!) the glass.

Scan Photos

You can scan at 300 or 600dpi. Here’s a 300dpi scan (Full size version here).

Pop The Top

Even though the Flip is nominally a flatbed, you can take the top off and use it to scan mostly… anything.

One great use of this is scanning smaller notebooks. There is a plastic bottom, so you can see exactly where you’ll be scanning.

Here’s the output of a notebook scan in PDF format.

The scanner and associated software has AutoStitch capability, which means if you are scanning something that is larger than its 4×6 size, you can scan it piece by piece and it will join it together.

Scan 3D Objects

As I mentioned earlier, you aren’t limited to scanning paper and photos. You can scan fabric and even 3D objects.

In my experience, the 3D scanning works best for objects where the Flip can lie flat on top of it. Here is a scan of my very dirty and chipped up iPhone.

Here’s my son’s Beyblade, which for some reason is on my desk.

Doxie Software

I have long been a fan of Doxie products, as you can probably tell from my Doxie Go review and my Doxie One review. Part of that is the hardware, but I feel that Doxie products really shine when it comes to software.

They make it easy and friendly to work with your scans, and the Doxie Flip is no exception.

You can manipulate your documents and images, “staple” them together to join them into a single document, and export them to PDF, JPG, or upload them to cloud services such as Evernote or Dropbox.

If you want to clean up or adjust any of the scans, you can do that in the software as well.

One weird thing about the Doxie Flip – you can export to PDF, but you can’t use Doxie’s OCR capabilities to make those PDFs searchable. Not sure why that is, but there you go.

Fun and Portable

The Doxie Flip is an interesting device. If you’re looking for a scanner to go paperless, this is probably not the one. However, if you want a fun and easy way to scan photos and other small objects, it works quite well and is very versatile.

I can’t see myself using a Flip a whole lot (mainly because I don’t have many physical photos and don’t write in paper notebooks anymore), but I will bet there are some readers out there who will see this and think “this is perfect!”