There's portable, and then there's portable. With the $149 IRIScan Anywhere 5 WiFi manual sheet-feed document scanner, all you need to take with you is the scanner itself. No cables, laptop, tablet, or smartphone are required. The difference between it and its competitors, the Editors' Choice Visioneer RoadWarrior X3 ($112.99 at Amazon) and Canon imageFormula P-215II Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner ($183.32 at Amazon) , is that the Anywhere 5 runs on a rechargeable battery and scans to a MiniSD card. In scans quickly and accurately, but short battery life and the inability to scan directly to its bundled software mean it falls just short of an Editors' Choice nod.
Design and Features
At 1.7 by 10.6 by 2.1 inches (HWD) and weighing a slight 11.6 ounces, the Anywhere 5 ($99.00 at Amazon) is about the same size and weight as the RoadWarrior X3 (1.5 by 11.4 by 2.2 inches and 13.4 ounces). The Canon P215II, while it measures about the same in height and width, weighs 2 pounds 3 ounces, but then it comes with two scanning sensors for single-pass two-sided scanning and an automatic document feeder (ADF) for unassisted scanning of multipage documents. With both the Anywhere 5 and RoadWarrior X3 you must feed each page to the scanner manually, one page at a time. The Anywhere 5 has a small (1.4-inch color) LCD and a set of controls that lets you configure your scans (file type, resolution, and so on) directly from the scanner itself. You can also choose connection options (Wi-Fi or USB), as well as view and delete scans, from this control panel, making it—for the most part—a self-contained scanning device.
You can buy the Anywhere 5 in one of four colors: black, red, white, or turquoise (we tested the black model). IRIS also makes two versions of the Anywhere 5, WiFi (reviewed here) and a non-WiFi (USB only) version for $20 less. The Wi-Fi radio allows you to connect to the scanner without a cable, as well as connect to your Windows, Android, or iOS smartphone or tablet via a downloadable app. That said, no matter whether you connect via the included USB cable (which is required for charging, anyway) or over the air, you can't scan directly to your PC or Mac. Instead, your computing device downloads your scans from the included 4GB MiniSD card. The computer sees the scanner as a portable storage drive. Or you can remove the memory card, insert it into the included adaptor, and retrieve your scans via the SD card slot on your PC.
As mentioned, the Anywhere 5 deploys an internal battery that allows you to scan sans USB connection or other power source, but the battery is good for only 100 scans per charge, which may be a significant limitation. We can think of several scenarios where you'd need to get way more than 100 scans in one sitting, such as, say, at a trade show (or scanning birth certificates during Little League signups). The good news is that in addition to the USB port on your computing device, you can also charge the Anywhere 5 from the same power adaptor you use for your tablet or smartphone, since it uses the same 5V MicroUSB cable. As part of my tests, when I scanned a few hundred pages with a USB power source connected, I didn't have to stop once to wait for the battery to charge. In other words, it can scan and charge at the same time.
Similar Products
In addition to the MiniSD card, the SD card adaptor, and USB cable, the Anywhere 5 also comes with a vinyl drawstring bag for toting the scanner around with you.
Setup and Software
Setting up the Anywhere 5 consists of inserting the MiniSD card into a slot in the back of the device and then charging the scanner from a USB source, such as a laptop, desktop, or USB charger. The entire process takes all of about 5 minutes. Charging, on the other hand, takes about 1.5 hours, which is an improvement over some previous iterations, such as the Anywhere 2 we reviewed several years ago; it took 4 hours to charge. While setting up the device itself was easy, due primarily to some not-so-clear Getting Started material that comes in the box, I had a little difficulty finding and downloading the so-called bundled software, and it didn't help that the company's website said that included programs were part of the "Box content."
IRISscan Anywhere 5 WiFi
While it doesn't require software to scan (recall that you can't scan directly to your computing device), you will need programs for converting scans to searchable and editable text, as well as exporting scans to different file formats, such as Word or PDF. For that, IRIS provides its own ReadIRIS Pro, a highly capable optical character recognition (OCR) program. You also get CardIRIS, a business card archiving application, and IRISCompressor, a utility for converting scans to "compressed" PDFs. According to IRIS, IRISCompressor can make "any image or PDF up to 20 times smaller" (in file size, of course).
Since ReadIRIS also supports conversion to both image and searchable PDF, as well as OCR and exporting to several popular file formats, aside from processing business cards, I did most of my testing with it. You can upload your scans to ReadIRIS in several ways, including drag-and-drop, importing them from the MiniSD card while it's inside the scanner, or from your computer's SD card slot. When you open ReadIRIS (or CardIRIS) with the memory card in the computer or the scanner, the program sees the most recent scans and prompts you to import one, some, or all of them. For the most part, this worked quite well, but CardIRIS (and ReadIRIS) has no way of telling document scans from scans of business cards; if you don't keep track of what you scanned in what order, you could (as I did) wind up with business-card scans in your document processing software, and vice versa. When importing from the memory card while it's in the scanner, though, you can scroll through and view your scans on the LCD.
Performance
It's difficult to test most manual portable scanners for speed (especially this one) because a lot depends on how fast you can feed each page to the scanner. We also test how fast document scanners scan (and subsequently save) to both image and searchable PDF file formats, but since getting the scan images from the memory card to ReadIRIS is also a manual process dependent on human interaction, that's not really feasible here. In any case, IRIS rates the Anywhere 5 at 8 pages per minute (ppm). I managed to feed and scan at a rate of about 7.5ppm, whether I scanned to JPEG or image PDF; the scanner supports both formats. The Visioneer RoadWarrior X3 scanned at 5.5ppm, and the Canon P-215II scanned one sided pages at 14.8ppm. When I scanned at the default resolution of 300dpi, ReadIRIS opened and displayed scans almost instantly, and the software converted them to both image and searchable PDF at a reasonably fast clip.
I also scanned several photographs, both color and grayscale, with surprisingly good results. On the first pass, my photo scans came out too light, but after following the calibration routine laid out in one of the several flyers in the box, the Anywhere 5 scanned our test photos with better than passable results, with good detail and accurate colors. It was not, however, capable of scanning an 8.5-by-11-inch photo at the highest resolution (1,200dpi). When I opened it on our testbed PC, only half of the photo was imaged, indicating that the scanner is short on the RAM required to process so large a high-resolution scan.
IRISscan Anywhere 5 WiFi
OCR and other Tests
When transforming Anywhere 5 scans of text to editable text, ReadIRIS converted both our Arial and Times New Roman font test pages down to 8 points without any errors. We got the same results from the Visioneer RoadWarrior X3, and the Canon P215II didn't do quite as well. It managed 8 points without errors on the Arial font page, but only 12 points on the Times New Roman portion of the test. Converting text successfully at 8 points and higher should suffice for most business documents, except those containing exceptionally small print.
I also imported several business cards into CardIRIS, with mixed results. As has been my experience with CardIRIS and other business card archiving software, as long as you scan simple cards with standard fonts on white or light color backgrounds, the conversion to text and the subsequent populating of the database fields were highly accurate, although CardIRIS ignored addresses on many of the cards I scanned. But the program didn't do well with cards with color backgrounds, gradients, and other features that, while they may make the cards themselves look attractive, interfered with the conversion. Even when I turned on filters that were supposed to screen those design features out, I wound up making multiple edits to each imported business contact. It's tough to say whether scanning these cards actually saved time from entering the data manually.
Scan Anywhere?
The IRIScan Anywhere 5 WiFi manual portable scanner is unique in that you don't need to connect it to another device, and the Wi-Fi radio and downloadable app let you export your scans to your smartphone or tablet. Mostly, it works as advertised, and quite well. We understand that IRIS wants to keep the scanner small and light to make it highly portable, but if a longer-lasting battery caused it to weigh a little more, we'd prefer that, as it would be a lot better suited for truly portable (cable-free) scanning sessions. On the other hand, it will charge and scan simultaneously from any USB power adapter designed to use a standard MicroUSB cable—even from your car's USB charger. And the Wi-Fi feature allows you to upload scans to your smartphone or tablet wirelessly. The Anywhere 5 has several unique features that makes it worth considering if you need truly portable scanning.
The IRIScan Anywhere 5 WiFi is a relatively fast and accurate manual portable document scanner that operates without a computer. Longer battery life would make it a must-have.
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Sign up for other newslettersAbout William Harrel
Former Contributing Editor
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