Other portable scanners, mostly of the fully-detached type, require you manually wave or roll the scanner over the page. This guarantees a good scan but limits the maximum size document you can scan. Some portable scanners of both types have a small one-page feed mechanism so you can insert a page, press the scan button, and it will pull the page over the imager. With these, you scan the photograph or document and download it to your computer later. The fully-detached portable scanners don’t require any external connections to scan, although most of them do require an additional storage card (usually an SD card) which adds to their cost. That makes them less portable, as you’ll also need to carry some sort of mobile device with you and probably at least a tablet-sized device so you can check image quality without zooming in and out too much. The small computer scanners can be cheaper, but they need to be connected to a computer in order to work. Portable scanners come in two different variants: very small computer scanners and fully-detached scanners.

But are they worth it? How Portable Scanners Work (Sometimes they’re called mobile scanners.) They tend to cost between $70 and $200, with the main price point being about $100.

You’ve probably heard of or seen the small portable scanners now on the market.

Handheld document scanner for genealogy