Simply adorable
From the moment you take it out of the box, Doxie will charm you--and not just because it’s adorned with pink heart stickers. Doxie is a portable, easy-to-use scanner that may very well replace that huge hunk of a scanner you have collecting dust in the corner of your home office--as long as your scanning needs fall into the “nothing too complicated” category.
Setting up Doxie is a snap. All you have to do is plug it in to a USB port (no AC power required), download the software from getdoxie.com, and feed through a calibration page. And speaking of feeding, sending documents and photos through the scanner is a cinch, and Doxie easily handles oddly sized paper. You do have to take care to align pages as they enter the feeder, though, or the resulting scans end up a bit skewed.
A slim, ultra-portable scanner comes in handy more often than you might think.
The best part about the software is its social-networking integration. You can set up the software to share your scanned items via popular sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Google Docs, and Flickr. Additionally, the free Doxie Cloud service allows you to upload your files and generate a short URL valid for a certain amount of time, ranging anywhere from one week to three months. These time-limited links can be useful, but we’d also like the ability to password-protect certain documents for added security.
The scan quality of the Doxie is fine for casual use. Business travelers will also like its slim, ultra-portable form factor and the fact that it doesn’t require a bulky AC adapter. Pro users, though, will find the Doxie’s tech specs a bit soft. For starters, this scanner isn’t a flatbed, so it’s only good for sheets of paper that can be fed through the device (up to 8.5 by 14 inches). And Doxie’s resolution tops out at 600 dpi. The color quality of the scanned photos is slightly washed out, but scans of black and white text documents were satisfactory. Getting our scans perfectly straight was also a challenge, though the software does allow you to rotate the scans if things get a little out of whack.
The scanning software that comes bundled with Doxie is incredibly simple to use. To scan a document, press the Scan button in the software window, or press the heart-shaped button on the device itself. As soon as your scan is finished, the software displays a window with several customization options. You can add more pages to scan a multipage document into a single file, as well as perform minor photo corrections like cropping and tweaking the contrast, brightness, and saturation. You can also configure the Doxie scanner software to open your scanned images in other applications for editing, like Adobe Photoshop, Picasa, and iPhoto.
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