Mustek HS600

How often do you feel the need of having brought the scanner with yourself? Most probably the person who would have recognized himself in the first question would be a businessman who needs to attend per day quite a big number of meeting and conferences, or maybe you are a student, or a young researcher who studies books in the library almost every single day. If you belong to this small group of users, the portable scanner will be a good cure for the library queue to scanners and copiers when the smartphone's built-in camera is not enough to save the valuable information. The hero of our today's review is one of the most powerful an functional portable devices of this sort - Mustek HS600. This handheld scanner that runs on batteries, is capable of scanning and coping the full documents of A4 size and smaller.           

As scanner is best learned by its technical characteristics, let’s learn about those. The optical resolution of the Mustek HS600 is 600x300 ppi in its max and 300x150 ppi minimum. The type of scanning element used in this device is the Contact Image Sensor with the maximum scan area of A4 format which is equal to 210x297 mm. The scanner has a great possibility to be connected to the PC or a laptop with the miniUSB. In addition it has a memory card slot microSD for up to 32 GB memory. The scanning element creates documents in the JPEG file format. The power source of the Mustek HS600 is represented by 2 AA batteries. The size dimensions of the device are 255x29x31 mm, on the exterior design resembling a sort of a handle. The weight of the device is equal to164 g without batteries.

Handheld scanners Mustek HS600 has a small size and weight. At length it is smaller than the long side of A4 paper, in its width Mustek is a little less than 3 cm and weight including batteries is about 200 g. In such a way it is one of the most portable devices of this sort given the high functionality currently offered on the market.

The body case of the handheld scanner Mustek HS600 is plastic. Despite the modest number of connectors, buttons and other elements released, HS600 looks a little too bright because of all these different elements of color and caliber. But as the hand-held scanner - not even a desktop, its visual appeal is not the most crucial here.

Getting started with Mustek HS600 is just as easy as to tie shoelaces: you need to pick the right settings on the two buttons and press Scan. Button assignment is as follows: On / Off scan mode settings (color or b / w), and the scan quality (600 ppi and 300 ppi). They, as well as a monochrome screen and a battery compartment are located at the front of the device. The scanning sensor and wheel to move the scanner over the surface of the scanned document are found on the bottom. On one of the side panels is settled miniUSB-socket and a slot for memory cards.

But the market now has a lot of other portable models and better look through other solutions for portable scanning before buying this device. Maybe you will find the one that will suit you better.

As with every device there are pros and cons. It allows working with documents of different thickness, while portable devices in which the scanned page itself passes through a scanner with only one page. But the result is a better work. Scan speed of Mustek HS600 per page in color and in good quality is 13 seconds; in lower setting- 3 seconds. The b / w page A4 in good quality is scanned in 6 seconds, and in lower setting - for 2 seconds. After a specified time, the indicator Scan is disabled. The difference in the b / w scanning is quite noticeable, but the color picture is virtually identical.