IRIScan Desk 5-A4 Portable Scanner,8MP Document Scanner, USB, Camera with Auto-Flatten, AI Technology, Fingerprint Removal, Multi-Language OCR, Windows & macOS Grey

This is a manual scan. You have to center whatever it is you want too scan under the scanner, take the picture/scan, remove the item and place next one down. I was looking for something that I could feed several pages at once. This was the wind piece of equipment for me.

easy to use, very good images

Bought this item because it was supposed to manage the curvature of the book while scanning. That did not happen. Save your money.

I got this scanner as a gift. It is semi-portable, requiring a USB connection with a Windows computer. Shouldn’t be difficult to pack the scanner, its USB cable, and its black background mat into a easily transportable package. The instruction manual consists of a small glossy booklet, in multiple languages, telling you to go to the Irislink_dot_com. The website has several unavailable videos that might instruct you on the Desk 5's use, and a far more useful User Guide is downloadable as PDF. The software interface is a flashback to the late 90's or early 2000's "DOS with a mouse" environment. The excellent auto page straightening/orientation and fingertip removal features are available when scanning in the "Document" mode. When scanning in "Book" mode you are presented with a vertical dividing line to indicate the positioning of the spine to allow auto pagination in PDF. “Finger Hiding” and curved page flattening are present in Book mode. I haven’t tried the “Video” mode, used for overhead projection at a far lower resolution. Scanning can be: 1) automatic, where the scanner detects the boundaries of the pages and waits until you quit moving it around before snapping the capture 2) a choice of two scanning cycles that snap a scan in either 5 or 7 second intervals (a lot of scans can look like Bill the Cat until you get the rhythm down) 3) manual scanning when you click on the “Scan” button onscreen for each page. There is apparently NO Mac version of the Iriscan Desk 5 software yet, and separate versions for the 5 and 5 Pro. Michael H is right. The built-in LED lights are very glarey at the 2 brightest settings. The glare is definite and disruptive on paperback covers, and can wash out a circle on non-glossy paper pages. I'm experimenting with various cloth/paper filters over the LEDs along with replacement external lighting. The winner so far is a square of single layer paper towel taped over the built-in lights. They run cool and haven't heated the paper towel noticeably. Some of the book scans with the paper filter have been pretty impressive. Side lighting with a clip-on kindle gooseneck LED has also been promising. I am going to experiment with raising the scanner higher above the scanned surface to capture a larger page size, even though at lower Dots Per Inch and the resulting lower OCR reliability. The Iriscan software included is bare bones compared to full-fledged OCR & PDF packages. It very often guesses poorly at conversion to Word or RTF. It may be a result of the lighting problem. An odd hardware problem did arise early when the software was unable to detect the scanner on the USB port on a computer running Windows 7. The program won’t run until scanner detection is complete. Win7 did see the scanner as a camera in Device Manager, but couldn’t convince Iriscan’s app that it was there. Casey from Iris Helpdesk told me I had to allow camera permissions in Windows settings. The scanner worked as advertised after allowing software access by turning on camera sharing. Now I have to get the lighting sorted out and find a really capable PDF/OCR conversion app to be really happy preserving my ancient store of crumbling paperbacks. Any recommendations for the OCR software at a working man’s price would be much appreciated.

Good product. However lot of limitation with the software provided. Not intuitive and feels very dated.