Doxie One - Standalone Portable Document & Photo Scanner

Scanning documents can be a huge hassle. You have to feed them to your scanner, convert them to PDF, name them, and organize them on your computer. I rarely had enough motivation to do all of the above at once, leading to huge piles of paper cluttering my home office. The doxie takes the pain out of scanning by separating different tasks and allowing you to work on documents in batches. Now, I just grab a stack of documents and feed them to the scanner during TV commercials or whenever I have some time but dont feel committed to doing any of the other steps. Then, when I feel like it, I upload the documents to my PC, name and sort them using the included software, and, as a last step, convert them to PDF and save them to my Google Drive. The conversion process takes a while, but you can do something else while the software is working. I really love this streamlined workflow. By the way, my scanner has no trouble scanning legal-sized documents, although this feature is not advertised for this model (officially supported on the Doxie Go only). The scanning is fast enough (about 10 seconds per page) . The scanner does not mind creases and rarely misfeeds or jams if the paper has clean edges. The scanner does get stuck if the edges of the paper -particularly the corners- are bent. Unlike the doxie go, the doxie one cannot be powered via the USB port and requires either an external adapter or a set of four rechargeable AAA batteries. Be sure to carry around an extra set of batteries as the scanner does not provide a warning when they run low and might quit in the middle of the scan. Transferring scans is seamless - either use a SD-card reader or connect the scanner to the computer via the supplied USB cable, which is the mini-USB kind, not the more popular micro-USB used with tablets and newer cell phones. As others have pointed out, the SD-card does stick out and needs to be removed for storage. The doxie Go offers internal memory for a sleeker look. Neither doxie offers the ability to zoom in on scans in the software, but this functionality is reportedly coming soon. In the meantime, an enlarged edit view can be used as a workaround, except for tiny text. One of the best things about doxie is its excellent customer service. When my scanner developed a problem with the power plug, doxie replaced it quickly and without any hassle. Not to mention, the people at doxie actually read your emails and reply -quickly- with a personalized message rather than some canned response. It is good to know that even in the unlikely event that something does go wrong, doxie wont leave you hanging.

The 5-star rating is also a reflection of the customer service. My first doxie was malfunctioning on arrival. I contacted customer service and they were extremely courteous and helpful. After some quick troubleshooting, ( very quick, done in one conversation) they sent a replacement and had me ship the broken one back in the same box. They paid for all shipping of course. The replacement was brand new (not refurbed) and worked flawlessly. The Doxie One ships with AC adapters for the US, United Kingdon, Europe and Australia. If you really want to take this thing places, you wont have to buy an adapter. It will also run on 4 aaa batteries. A 2GB SD card is also included. The USB cable is only used for transferring the digital images from your Doxie to your PC. The USB cable does not power the Doxie One. When my new Doxie arrived I set to work digitizing 29 years of documents. This kind of task is best performed with a machine that can handle batches of paper but, I am cheap err, frugal yeah, lets say frugal so, I did it all one sheet at a time by hand. I didnt see the need to spend a few hundred bucks just to get through the initial batch of personal documents. Everything after that will be in manageable portions and a portable scanner will be more than enough.The Doxie was a workhorse and performed perfectly. The only bad scans were my fault and related to damaged documents The Doxie performs best when fed a diet of perfectly flat sheets of paper and sitting on a flat surface. If your document is damaged, I suggest feeding the sheet through starting at the least damaged side. Like a photo the image can be flipped later. Taking the time to remove staples and smooth out creases is well worth the effort. Much like painting, you dont HAVE to do the prep work but, if you dont, youll pay for it in labor. For those who are unhappy with the need to feed the sheets carefully, I suggest looking at some handheld scanners on the market. They cost almost as much as the Doxie but YOU move the scanner over the sheet of paper. I used to own one of those. They work well but take FOREVER. After experiencing those devices you, like me, will truly appreciate what the Doxie does and how well it performs especially at this price. Unlike its closest competitor the Neat portable scanner, the Doxie One will work with PC or Mac. The Neat scanner has to be purchased in the model that is designed for your OS and will not work with a different OS. The Neat portable scanner also costs $30 more. If you adjust your expectations for a portable scanner and dont expect it to work like a commercial machine, you will be very happy with the Doxie One. I highly recommend it.

Update June 14, 2016: Im raising this from 1 star to 3 stars. The companys Support is stellar. They pointed out that I was using alkaline batteries, which apparently WILL NOT WORK. They helped me acquire some Panasonic Eneloop rechargeable batteries which they say are appropriate for this machine. I cant say enough good things about their support. It is still very challenging for me to feed a standard piece of paper into this scanner. Its probably just me. I put the paper in against the left edge, and nothing happens. Thinking I failed to activate the sensor, I pull it out and place it again, and again. Eventually, the scanner activates and grabs the page at a moment when I wasnt ready, feeding the page at an angle and sometimes rolling creases into it. I need to keep practicing and learn how to be patient, placing the page and having confidence that the scanner will eventually pull it in. Original review ********************************************************** Misfeeds 8.5x11 pages. Its very difficult to get a good scan on this device. Pros: Very small. Battery powered. Saves scans to SD card which is easily plugged into to a computer, table, phone or printer. (The main reason I bought this scanner). Cons: Requires keeping and using a calibration card that will most likely be lost. Misfeeds or refuses to grab pages resulting in partial scans or pages that look like piece of silly putty. At my office we have several Brother DS-720D. Theyre larger, use USB to power the scanner and deposit the image on a connected computer with software installed. But they duplex scan and deposit the image on the computer. I will be buying more of these. I will never buy another Doxie scanner.

This is one of the best scanners you can but at this price point right now. It just arrived today and right our of the box I put this thing through the tests. 250- 300 photos non-stop. This thing performed beautifully. I have just have a couple of complaints. Pros and Cons. Cons first. Con 1. The free software that comes with it is not the best. 3.5/5.0 Plus the editing software also had trouble decoding some of the pictures, because it could not translate it fully It just put a huge pink X where the picture was supposed to be. The editing software such as the cropping, saturation and stuff is okay. But hey, its free. Con 2. The Doxie did fail once out of the 250-300 photos I put through it. The scanner just stopped. Froze up. Easy fix though I restarted it, and went on my way. But I put very little fault on the product. I ran this thing much harder than it was supposed to go at one time. 3. This unit CANNOT scan directly to a computer. You have to take out the SD card then put it in your computer. I have a Mac. Late 2009 model. I do not have a SD card slot. Luckly this unit comes with a transfer cable just in case of this situation. But you HAVE to have a SD card. Again, This unit only scans to the SD card. PROS 1. This unit is flat out awesome. It scanned 250-300 photos non-stop with only 1 fault. 2. This unit comes with a 2 GB card. 2 GB can give you about 400 photos. 3. Comes with really cool accessories. Very cool photo protector as it goes through. If you have a very delicate/fragile piece of paper it keeps it from coming apart or being damaged while its scanning. It has a cleaning tool made out of plastic and a micro fiber cloth. and 4 different wall outlets just incase you go to different countries. 4. Super easy to setup. Very easy to read manual. 5. Simple Unit, not all these fancy buttons and gizmos. A 7 year old child could operate this machine. 6. It runs on a wall charger, plus rechargeable batteries (Not included) if you are not near wall. 7. Automatic shut off when not used. 8. Extremely quiet. No dying whale sounds coming from this unit. 9. If you are worried about the 300 DPI on photos, dont be. These photos look great at 300 Dpi. Left nothing to be desired. 10. For the money you pay. You definitely get your return on investment. Very happy buy with this. Will post updates if anything occurs with this product. Thank You.

Minuses- You CANNOT scan anything when the Doxie is hooked to a computer via USB. You CAN import images that you scanned when the computer was disconnected, but you CANNOT scan any more images until you disconnect the USB! This is a real PITA. The software, while useful, does not allow you to import files that were not generated by the Doxie. If you try to import a pre-existing JPG scan into the software, the software generates an import error, stating that the file was not scanned with a Doxie scanner. Therefore, if you scan 10 things with the Doxie, and one thing with your flatbed scanner, you cannot combine the files in the Doxie software. This is a very unfortunate way to set things up! You cannot use AAA alkaline batteries. The hardware is purposely designed so that it wont work. You can only use NimH rechargeable AAA batteries, and you need four of them. This will be an extra expense for me. Yes, I know Doxie wants to save the whales, but this design ensures that you wont be able to pop in some available-anywhere-in-the-world-alkalines when your rechargeables crap out. So, you must either pack the power supply or a recharger for longer trips, defeating the purpose of being able to operate on batteries. The edge of the paper must be meticulously and seriously flat to enter the scanner. There is no room for error. The slightest edge crease will keep the paper from entering the scanner. Inserting the paper properly is a very delicate operation. My scanner seems to grip the paper tighter on the right side, which worries me. When something goes wrong, the right side of the paper will be drawn in, while the left side remains semi-stationary. Of course, this results in a failed scan. The Doxie seems to need more grip; it holds the paper VERY gently. If you are heavy-handed, this scanner is not for you. After a few scans, it is pretty easy to recognize when an item needs to be re-scanned. Obviously, since youre not hooked to a computer (CANT be hooked to a computer!), you cant tell for sure how the scan went. You want to make sure you re-scan it now, rather than later, which is easy enough to do. Pluses- Very simple to use. The scanner only has one on/off button to deal with. A flashing light in the on/off button alerts you when it (or you) screws up. Scan quality is very fine, more than enough for storing documents or receipts. A stack of old photos is incredibly easy to scan, and the scan quality is suitable for snapshots of the quality most people are likely to have. It is much easier than using a flatbed scanner to scan an existing folder full of stuff. Once your paper folder is scanned, you can sit down, easily delete bad scans (there will be a few baduns in each batch), re-order them if you want to, then export in a variety of formats. It is easy to make OCR documents. You can combine all your imported documents into one file, staple them together in the software, then export the entire file as a plain PDF or an OCR PDF, which allows you to easily seach larger PDF files for a single item. The OCR seems to work very well, but will obviously slow things down tremendously. The document auto-cropping works perfectly. This ensures documents are only as large as they need to be. Auto-cropping and straightening for scanned photos is fair, sometimes resulting in thin white edges. The software does a nice job of enhancing the documents contrast, straightening it, and making it more readable. Thats why I would REALLY LIKE to be able to combine files in the Doxie software from my flatbed scanner! Mine came with a 4GB SD card.

The Doxie One is my first experience with a portable scanner. I have had it for less than a month and have had some success with scanning letter sized documents. As others have mentioned, the paper feed is tricky. It will grab the document on one edge and attempt to run it through crooked. Eventually, one gets the feel for how that works and it becomes less of a problem with practice. Every paper edge has to be straight which means sometimes I have to send the document in bottom edge first then rotate it in the software which comes with the device. The paper guide would be more useful if it were larger and in a contrasting color from the device. It also slides out of position easily so I do not bother with it anymore. As a result, there is almost always a black line on the right or left side of the scan which I crop off using the software. The software is straightforward to use. Although, it does not seem to want to delete files that have been saved elsewhere. I have followed the onscreen instructions and it appears that the files are gone but when I am ready to import a new set of scans, it gets busy importing old scans that should have been deleted. To get around this, I manually delete the saved files from the media card before starting a new set of scans. The power supply has multiple attachments for different types of electrical outlets. The end that goes into the device is easily dislodged though so I have to try not to move around too much while using it. It takes rechargeable batteries (sold separately). I do not want to invest anymore money in this device. The size and weight of the Doxie One are precisely what I was hoping to get. The speed of the scanning process is great. Importing the scan to a computer using the USB cable takes a long time even when it is not trying to import old scans. Since I have to manually delete files anyway, I am planning to experiment with importing directly from the media card to see if it will be faster. I am giving it three stars (Its OK) because of all the extra work I have to do to get the results I want. If I had not purchased this on sale at a good price, I would have returned it for something else.

I bought the Doxie One, and I dont regret it. The most important criterion in a purchase for me is reliability, and having soldiered through a massive backlog of paperwork and receipts, I feel reasonably confident giving the Doxie One a positive mark on that score. Once during the process, a discolored line began to appear on my scans, but a quick treatment with the included cleaning tool took care of it in short order. I have not tested the included software, but thats because one of the things I was looking for in a document scanner was the ability to operate without any special software - too many bad experiences with gaudy monstrosities of drivers. The Doxie One ticks that box as well - stick an SD card in the slot, start scanning, your scans appear as JPEG files on the card, plug in the USB cable and it looks to your PC the same as a thumbdrive or card reader. No options to configure the scanning when operating without the software, but for my purposes, I havent missed them. Theres only one standout bad thing about the Doxie One, but it can be very annoying: the document feeding mechanism is very fiddly. It actually deals with folded and wrinkled paper fairly well - such documents wont look beautiful, but theyll be readable. What it does not deal with well is paper with a less-than-crisp leading edge, especially if its a receipt. If you have such a document to scan, its probably going to take several frustrating attempts before you get a successful result. The machine will grab the edge and start rolling, one side will get stuck, the resulting image will be smeared beyond recognition, and youll just have to fiddle with the edge and try again until it works - I always managed to get it to work, but the experience wasnt terribly fun. Another reviewer commented that it was not unlike trying to get a wrinkled dollar bill recognized by a vending machine, and I have to agree. One more minor issue I experienced was that the scanner would cut off the bottom of any document longer than something like 14 inches. Not a problem if youre dealing with most paper documents, but annoying if you happen to be scanning the absurdly long receipts that seem to be popular with too many retailers these days. On the whole, it works well enough and itd be a really great product if they just put some more effort into the feeding mechanism.

I got this for myself to help reduce home paperwork. I initially hesitated because of some of the reviews and the fact that Doxie implies that only their more expensive scanners can do legal sheets, but decided to evaluate it anyway. Using it on a flat surface, it worked well. Legal and longer sheets work just fineMaybe one out of 50 pages generated a misfeed, usually when the paper had a sharp wrinkle near the end. I also use a desktop Snapscan at work and a large scale copier/scanner. I found misfeeds pretty even across all products. Image is crisp and clear with little to no smearing. Battery usage is fine for 5-10 sheets at a time, but when I tried doing it in large bulks, it had a propensity to act as if the battery was dead. Taking them out and putting them back solved this. With the AC adapter, no such problems. The scans go onto an included 2GB SD card as individual JPGs at a decent resolution in a DCIM folder, like a digital camera. You have to use the downloadable software package to save to other formats and combine pages into multipage PDFs. It will save PDFs with OCR if desired and this worked very accurately on the statements I scanned. I found ithe whole process pretty slow, however. This is an idea of the process involved: - Load SD card - Startup Doxie software and import scans (approx 5 secs per image) - Group scans together and staple (just a logical grouping in the software, takes no time) - Export each group to PDF with OCR (approx 8 secs per image) - Delete scans in software to save space (1 sec per group) My biggest gripe with the software is that it doesnt let you magnify or preview the scans large enough to see things like dates on statements. I would often have to export the image as a JPG to see what the date on the statement was in order to staple like documents. That area could be greatly improved. Otherwise, great product. I wouldnt recommend it for bulk scans, as its tedious and slow. ================= Update 2014.01.31 ================= Doxie actually contacted me via email and pointed out that I was probably using regular alkaline batteries (I was) and should use a quality set of rechargeable batteries, which they offered to provide to me for free. Getting these in place definitely improved the battery situation mentioned above. Very nice touch of customer service there that I must applaud them for. They also asked me if I knew about the Quick Look feature in the software per my comments about not being able to preview. The software does include a button that does a simple zoom of the page, but to me, its still insufficient. I cant read the date or account number off a scanned statement with this preview, which is critical to knowing which pages need to be grouped together - particularly if youre scanning a lot of statements in batch.

Fast shipping from Amazon Prime -- great service! Using this Doxie scanner to go paperless in a home-office environment. With an

(Originally 2 stars...) I wanted so badly to give 5 stars! On day 1 it was great - with some down sides (below), and it is exactly the tool I need to manage the complexity I deal with. But these things unfortunately have detracted enough from the quality, and now from the operation, of the Doxie scanner: 1. The most important problem is that 3.5 months after buying it, it stopped pulling paper through. Sometimes it stops half way, sometimes it doesnt recognize the paper at all. The most common manifestation of this problem was/is that it will grab the paper, meaning its sensor and motor are working but that the electronics are probably getting confused. But it is now doing this most of the time and is essentially useless. 2. Low quality of the physical connections. The power connection does not have a strong connection (it does not snap into place, and the cord falls out easily, and the cord stops delivering power when only 1mm out of the slot). The card reader does not have a snap feel to it, and does not actually fit the size of the memory card very closely, leading to a loosey-goosey feeling which causes me to constantly doubt whether it is plugged in properly. 3. Bad failure modes. What I mean is that any of the above problems requires pushing & holding down the power button for a few seconds to power off, fixing the problem (plugging the card and/or cable back in), and powering back on and waiting for a 5-10 second boot cycle. This wouldnt be so bad except that the only feedback is the light on the power button, and the speed of its blinking, which is cryptic at best. And that if you get it wrong, or if the problem is different than you expected, another boot cycle and another guessing game at the cryptic feedback. I love the idea of this product and I would have loved to give it 5 stars, but I am unfortunately still shopping for the perfect compact scanner. UPDATE: Changing this to 4 stars because of customer service. When they heard about my scanner, Doxies support staff overnighted a new one to me. The new one does appear to have more sturdy connectors and the pauses dont seem to be so bad. It works like new, of course, so hopefully this one will work out. Thanks!