Where To Buy a Portable Document Scanner
Many people want to have their own machine that they can use for scanning different documents at all times. Usually these machines go really well if you have some spare luggage or a bag where you can carry the scanner with you, but when it comes to a real portable document scanner, it can be quite difficult to actually find a machine that suits your needs really well. What you need to look for is a device that can fit within your laptop bag - you con't have a big machine that is larger than your laptop, because that simply defeats the purpose.
First of all when you are looking to buy a portable document scanner, you need to be sure that you get a machine of a decent quality. It can be easy to just go for the cheapest model that you can find, but in the end you will notice that it doesn't do too much good for you. You want a machine that suits your needs and also provides you the qualities that you are looking for. First of all I would look at some different things like the portability: you can get quite a lot of different sized machines, and it is up to you on how small you want to go. Keep in mind that when you are going smaller you are almost always sacrificing the quality of the scan.
Even though you can actually get quite good machines with the basic functions and a pretty decent scan with a pen scanner. these are really portable and can easily slide in any bag. The problem is that the usability isn't too great, and usually these are text scanners which you need to swipe accross the text and then have a specific program to interpret the image and turn it in to a text file. It is great if you need to convert documents to a digital form, but even so a flatbed would still give you a speed advantage.
Another relatively cheap portable document scanner is what I like to call a swiper. They allow you to swipe the scanner on the top of the document and convert it in to a picture. They are especially great if you are scanning pages or parts of a page from a book, since you don't have to worry about getting the whole book through a regular scanner. You can get these machines from about a $100 and these are already relatively good quality machines - I would not go with the cheapest ones since they can end up giving poor scans.
The best place to purchase electronics like this is an online store that allows you to easily compare the prices of different stores. I use Amazon