Business travel may not be what it was before the pandemic, but the portable scanner market has grown by leaps and bounds—not only to support employees in the field, but to help the work-from-home crowd be more efficient.
Whether you need to convert paper documents to editable text, create and maintain a database of business-card contacts, or put together an expense report with digitized receipts, a portable scanner will surely come in handy. You'll find mobile scanners in several different flavors, with widely varying features and capabilities. Even their portability varies from model to model.
We've pulled together our favorite tested picks for a broad range of applications. They include a few specialty scanners for tasks like collecting business cards at trade shows or digitizing book pages in libraries. After our detailed descriptions, look for our buying guide with general advice on picking a portable scanner and a spec breakout of our top models.
Most portable scanners don't need to be plugged into an electrical outlet to function. A few have batteries, and others get their juice via a USB tether to your laptop or desktop PC. Truly wireless scanners transmit data to your PC, phone, or tablet over Wi-Fi, and some support memory cards that let you scan without a computing device on hand.
Many factors come into play when choosing a portable scanner. Frequent business travelers must balance their desire for the smallest and lightest scanner with the need for particular features such as two-sided (duplex) scanning, high resolution, and fast scanning speed. If you're digitizing documents, you'll need good optical character recognition (OCR) to turn printed pages into editable text; if you scan at high volume, you'll want to consider the scanner's duty cycle, which is the recommended number of pages it can scan per day, week, or month. If you mostly scan invoices, sales receipts, applications, and other short documents, a fancier device with a 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF) may be overkill.
Let's take a closer look at what features make different portable scanners best suited for different tasks.
Manual-Feed vs. Sheetfed Portable Scanners
Portable scanners come in two basic types: manual-feed and sheetfed. The former accepts only one sheet at a time, though many can scan both sides of a page at once. Sheet-fed scanners come with ADFs for handling multi-page documents.
Portable scanners come in two basic flavors: manual-feed models (left) accept only one sheet at a time while sheetfeds (right) accept multipage jobs, usually up to 20 sheets. (Credit: Brother)The majority of portable scanners are manual-feed or single-sheet machines. They cost less than their sheet-fed counterparts, sometimes much less. If you don't need an automatic document feeder, there's no reason to shell out for one. On the other hand, if you anticipate lots of scan jobs of more than two or three pages, you probably want a sheet-fed model. Most come with ADFs that hold up to 20 pages.
Simplex vs. Duplex vs. Wand Scanning: What’s the Difference?
Nearly as important as whether a portable scanner accepts one or multiple pages is whether it has two sensors (one for each side of a page). Dual sensors allow duplex scanning, capturing both sides in one pass as opposed to scanning one side, flipping the page over, and feeding it back into the scanner (simplex or manual duplex). Most sheet-fed mobile scanners are duplex, though some lower-end portables scan only one side at a time.
When scanning one- or two-page documents with a manual-feed scanner, capturing one side at a time isn't so bad, but the more double-sided pages you scan, the more time-consuming and tedious simplex scanning becomes. An ADF will save you a bit of trouble for longer two-sided documents.
With a wand scanner, you move the device over the source document, instead of the machine pulling the source over its sensors. (Credit: IRIScan)If you want to scan a page from a book or something else that can't be fed into a conventional scanner, you need a wand scanner such as the IRIScan Book 5, which you hold in one hand and pass over the object you're scanning.
Portable Connectivity and Compatibility
Portable scanners transfer data to computers, phones, and tablets by either USB or Wi-Fi. Of the two, USB is much more restrictive. It works only with a Windows PC or Mac (in some cases only Windows) and won't play well with your tablet or smartphone. Wi-Fi scanners may add the option to communicate wirelessly with Android and iOS apps as well as laptops and desktops.
A few portable scanners support autonomous scanning via SD flash cards or USB thumb drives. While you're on the road, your scans are saved to the memory device, and you can transfer them to your PC (or a network drive or cloud service) when you return to your office or home. This is ideal for situations where you have limited desk space or luggage room for both your scanner and your computer.
Your Portable Scanner's Power Source
As mentioned, most modern portable scanners can get their power over a USB connection. Those that have internal batteries (or can be upgraded to use them) will generally be able to charge from a laptop's USB port, but many scan and charge more quickly when using AC power. If you're primarily using the scanner away from wall outlets, make sure it supports USB 3.0, which will transmit data more quickly as well.
Some portable scanners have built-in batteries, and many others can run on batteries that are purchased separately. If you plan on using a battery-powered scanner, check its estimated runtime or scan rating. Some are good for only about 100 scans per charge; others can handle up to 1,000.
How Quickly Should Your Portable Scanner Scan?
Some of today's portable models are just as quick as some larger desktop document scanners, but scan times vary widely. A portable scanner's speed is heavily dependent on what you're scanning, how it's fed through the machine, and what kind of output you want. If the scanner is manual-feed or manual-duplex, you need to insert each page; a scanner with an ADF will take care of that for you and speed up the job. Post-scanning processing, such as converting an image of a document to editable and searchable text, will take more time than storing a quick, unprocessed image such as a scan of a business card.
(Credit: Epson)Low-resolution scanning is relatively fast, but higher speed usually means lower quality. Typically, 300 dots per inch (dpi) is adequate for most text pages; anything lower can cause OCR accuracy to degrade. Most portable scanners support resolutions of at least 300dpi and some are capable of much higher.
Bundled Software and OCR Accuracy
Without software, a portable scanner is just a fancy doorstop. The software does the heavy lifting: accepting the raw image data from the scanner, recognizing and deciphering text and converting it, paginating the blocks of now-editable text, and saving documents to a format compatible with their intended application.
Financial data, for instance, might go to Excel or an accounting program such as QuickBooks. Text saved as searchable PDFs or documents may be edited in Microsoft Word, sent via email, saved to a cloud site, or printed. Contact information gleaned from business cards might be turned into leads in IRIS's Cardiris or Presto BizCard. Whatever you're scanning, you need to make sure your scanner comes with software that knows what to do with it. For the most part, the top scanner makers' products come with apps that address most applications. But this is one area where you should be as sure as you can be before pulling the trigger.
(Credit: Epson)Each manufacturer includes its own bundle of scanner drivers, interface apps, and other productivity and convenience software, such as OCR, document management, and data archiving programs. Most scanners support ISIS and/or TWAIN drivers that let you scan directly into applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft PowerPoint.
Nowadays, most scanning and OCR apps are well-developed and mature, combining popular features with highly accurate text recognition and conversion. OCR accuracy is important for saving time—if fixing OCR errors takes longer than keying in or retyping a document, why bother with a scanner?—and most recent scanners, portable or otherwise, have no difficulty producing error-free reads of text sizes down to 6 points or so. That's plenty small enough for most business applications. As long as you're scanning clean pages without stains, tears, wrinkles, or smudges—or business cards without fancy decorative fonts—any modern scanner should convert them without a hitch.
Credit Card, ID Card, and Business Card Scanning and Archiving
If you've ever tried scanning 2-by-3-inch cards, you know it can be hard to get small cards or thick laminated ones to pass through a scanner without skewing or getting stuck. Many makers of portable scanners have addressed this by adding a dedicated slot designed to move cards through the paper path.
This Brother ADS-1250W comes ready to accommodate business cards and other small documents. (Credit: Brother)If you plan to scan small or thick cards, save yourself some hassle and make sure you get a scanner that's ready to handle them.
What Do Scanner Volume Limits and Ratings Mean?
A scanner's daily duty cycle is the manufacturer's recommended limit or the number of scans you can do each day without causing undue wear and tear on the machine. This is usually a relatively large number. For a scanner with a 1,000-page daily duty cycle, you'd need to load its 20-page ADF more than 50 times in a day to exceed the volume limit. Even so, in most cases, you won't void a scanner's warranty by exceeding its duty cycle, so if you occasionally go above and beyond, don't be too concerned.
How Important Is a Portable Scanner’s Size and Weight?
If you're throwing your portable scanner into a carry-on bag or backpack, you'll want to pay attention to its size and girth. Once you've packed a laptop, its AC adapter, and any other gear you need to take with you such as a portable printer, adding a four-pound scanner can seriously weigh you down. To save your back, look for the lightest and smallest model with your feature requirements.
(Credit: Epson)The average cord-powered, manual-feed portable scanner weighs about a pound and measures around 2 inches square by 10 to 12 inches long. The features that add the most heft and volume are batteries and automatic document feeders, so if you don't need those, spare yourself the effort of hauling them around.
If you really do need both a printer and a scanner on the road, the least burdensome option might be something like the HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One, which measures 3.6 by 15 by 7.8 inches (HWD) and weighs 6.5 pounds. If you're setting up a full-featured office in your car or hotel room, an AIO unit will save you from juggling separate devices with a higher combined weight and footprint.
So, Which Portable Scanner Should I Buy?
Today's range of portable scanners is really impressive, and the selections we've gathered here—including several that have earned our Editors' Choice designation—should include something for anyone who needs to scan on the go. Take time to weigh the factors that matter most to you, and you'll find a portable scanner that hits the sweet spot. Need a bigger scanner that will live permanently in your office? Check out our recommendations for the best scanners overall.
