The IRIScan Desk 5 Pro ($299) looks more like an office lamp than a scanner, but don't let appearances fool you. This is a powerful, highly accurate performer that costs less than many of its competitors. An overhead scanner, the Desk 5 Pro nimbly scans book and magazine spreads, documents, ID and other cards, and some 3D objects. It also scans large areas at a high resolution, making it an easy shoo-in as our Editors' Choice for overhead scanners.
Scan Almost Anything
In addition to the Desk 5 Pro, IRIScan also offers a $199 non-Pro model, the Desk 5, that's equipped with an 8-megapixel camera, compared with the Pro version's 12MP shooter. The non-Pro model comes with an A4, or letter-size, scanning area, compared with the Pro version's larger A3-size area.
The Pro model also supports autofocus, barcode scanning, ID and passport scanning, business card scanning via the company's Cardiris software, and it comes with a capture button that allows you to execute scans directly from the scanner, instead of relying solely on the bundled software. The non-Pro unit, on the other hand, does not support these features.
Document and photo scanners typically deploy sensors that either travel over the object being scanned, or the document page or object itself moves over the sensors. The Desk 5 Pro, however snaps a picture, or scans the item in one quick instance, much like a standard camera, as shown in the image below.
Similar Products
The Desk 5 Pro measures 14.8 by 3.3 by 10.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.8 pounds. The Editors' Choice CZUR ET16 Plus, a similar desktop scanner, measures 15.4 by 8.7 by 14.8 inches and weighs 3.3 pounds, making it significantly bigger and heavier than the Desk 5 Pro.
In addition to the scanning apparatus and beam, you also get a large A3-size black mat that acts as the scanning bed, shown here.
Connectivity consists of a USB 2.0 port at the base of the scanner/beam unit. There's also a second USB port for scanning to thumb drives and other USB storage devices. The Desk 5 Pro is powered through USB, but unfortunatley doesn not have a built-in battery, so you'll need to be linked to a PC when using it. As such, it offers no wireless or mobile connectivity.
The Desk 5 Pro's recommended daily duty cycle is 500 pages, which is the same as the non-Pro model's daily volume rating, and its resolution is 300dpi, or 80dpi higher than the CZUR ET16 Plus. In addition to scanning, the Desk 5 Pro also acts as a 1,280-by-1,024-pixel digital video camera you can use for delivering live presentations.
To that end, the Desk 5 Pro comes with four built-in LED lamps for illuminating not only your scans, but also yourself or the material you are presenting. Other notable features include a self-timer shooter for automatically scanning in intervals of 3, 5, or 7 seconds; automatic detection of documents; book digitizing (including auto page-turn detection, book curve image flattening, finger-erasing, and front and back cover detection); automatic de-skewing and cropping; and automatic edge filling of damaged documents.
Bundled Software and Add-Ons
Most of the Desk 5 Pro's heavy lifting is performed by IRIScan Desk, which incorporates optical character recognition (OCR) in more than 130 languages and exports to JPEG, image and searchable PDF, TXT, JPG+XLS, JPG+TXT, as well as Microsoft Word and Excel and the ePub electronic book (eBook) format. The software detects when multiple documents are placed under the camera and then crops and saves them as separate or multipage files.
IRIScan Desk's automatic edge detection saves you from having to position papers and books precisely by automatically straightening and creating legible text in seconds. When used in combination with your webcam, you can create multi-camera videos, simultaneously recording the image from both the scanner and your webcam—including sound. Everything is recorded in the same video on a single screen, which is thereby useful for creating correspondence courses, e-learning videos, tutorials, and so on.
You also get Cardiris, a business-card-scanning and -archiving utility that IRIScan ships with all of its scanners. And, when used in combination with the optional IRISPowerscan ($844), you can capture MRZ codes and export the metadata to an XLS or structured XML file to in turn optimize your registration processes. Or, you can use the optional Readiris Corporate ($199) to save your videos to the AVI, MP4, FLV, and WMV video formats.
Scanning Performance
IRIScan rates the Desk 5 Pro at 2 seconds per page or 30 pages per minute, but that, of course, depends on several factors, including the file type you're saving your scans to, and, since this is essentially a manual-feed scanner, how fast you can replace documents in the scanning area or turn the page of a book.
Discounting the time to remove and replace each document on the scanner mat, when scanning to image PDF I clocked the Desk 5 Pro at about 3.5 seconds, or just faster than 17 pages per minute (ppm). Scanning to indexed, or searchable, PDF took about 7 seconds per page and/or book spread, which comes out to about 8.6ppm. Both numbers are a far cry from the product's 30ppm rating. When scanning to JPEG, though, the Desk 5 Pro managed about 23ppm. But then that format is good only for scanning graphics and photos, and IRIScan readily admits that this product is not optimized for photographs.
The CZUR ET16 Plus, on the other hand, saved to JPEG at the rate of 7ppm and required additional time to convert the scanned text to editable text, making it significantly slower than our Desk 5 Pro test unit. (For testing, I connected the Desk 5 Pro via USB 2.0 to our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.)
Optical Character Recognition Accuracy
During my conversion tests, the Desk 5 Pro transformed our Arial font test page error-free down to 6 points and our Times New Roman test page without mistakes down to 8 points. Compared with the CZUR ET16 Plus, the Desk 5 Pro's Times New Roman conversion rate was slightly (about 2 points) better. Also, when converting our decorative and standard, but less common, serif and sans-serif fonts to editable text, I saw slightly better results on the Desk 5 Plus compared with the ET16 Plus.
I also scanned a couple stacks of business cards into Cardiris, a business card scanning and contact archiving utility. As usual, the successful scanning of each card and populating the database was more contingent on the design of the individual cards themselves than the accuracy of the scanner and supporting software. In other words, plain white or lightly colored cards with common serif or sans-serif typefaces scanned, converted, and found the proper fields in the database forms usually without issue. The more fancifully designed cards with decorative type, gradient and/or dark-colored backgrounds required error correction.
Versatile, Good-Value Overhead Scanner
Admittedly, the Desk 5 Pro is a bit of a niche product that we haven't reviewed many of. That said, it's the fastest and one of the least expensive overhead scanners that we've seen. It's also the most accurate and the most versatile, and will take up very little space on your desktop. If scanning books and 3D objects is on your agenda, the Desk 5 Pro is an Editors' Choice.
The IRIScan Desk 5 Pro is a versatile and highly accurate overhead book scanner designed for tethering to your PC or laptop.
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Sign up for other newslettersAbout William Harrel
Former Contributing Editor
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