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State of the Art

Scanning on the Go, Wirelessly

At this point, the first rule of technology should be clear to everyone: as progress marches forward, gadgets get smaller. Our phones. Our cameras. Our laptops. Our savings.

But there’s a fly in the truism: some things can’t get smaller forever. You can’t make a microwave oven smaller than the food you put inside. You can’t design a Blu-ray player that’s smaller than the disc it’s supposed to play. And you can’t make a scanner that’s smaller than the pages or photos you want to scan.

You can come pretty close, though. Several companies sell compact portable scanners that could almost fit inside the cardboard tube from a paper-towel roll: foot-long skinny gadgets with a slot that pulls in photos and papers and spits them out the back. The scan quality is surprisingly good, and the speed is decent (about two seconds a page). The huge drawback is that you can’t scan books, magazines or anything else that won’t slide through that slot.

If you can live with that limitation, you might consider the new, straightforwardly named Xerox Mobile Scanner ($250). It’s battery-powered, so you can scan anywhere (up to 300 scans on a charge). The scans can go directly to a flash drive you’ve plugged into the back, or onto a camera memory card, or over a USB cable to your computer.

But the Mobile Scanner’s truly useful twist is that it can be completely wireless. Not just no power cord, but no cable to your computer, either. It can fling your scanned photos or documents through the ether to almost anywhere: your iPhone or Android phone, for example. Your iPad or Android tablet. A laptop. Or even a Web site, where other people can immediately see and download the results.

I’ll wait here while you let that sink in. This means you: students, researchers, lawyers, real estate types, inspectors, genealogists, artists and business card collectors of all stripes. Now you can whip this foot-long scanner out of your bag, feed in a photo or page (from 2 by 2 inches up to 8.5 by 11.7 inches), and then marvel as it shows up on your phone, ready to forward to anyone in the world. Or onto your iPad, safely copied from the original, ready for instant retrieval. Score one for portability.

If you’re a true-blue technoholic, you might recognize certain themes of this story. You might have heard of the Eye-Fi card: a traditional SD memory card for cameras that, somehow, also contains Wi-Fi wireless circuitry. Pop this thing into any camera model, and it suddenly becomes a Wi-Fi camera, capable of transmitting your photos to your computer, phone or a photo gallery Web site like Flickr.

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Credit...Stuart Goldenberg

In creating its Mobile Scanner, Xerox didn’t bother reinventing the wireless wheel. Instead, it worked with the Eye-Fi people to develop a customized version of their magic little card. The chief enhancement: The Xerox version of the Eye-Fi card is capable of transmitting PDF documents wirelessly, not just photos. (It’s worth noting that it’s otherwise a standard Eye-Fi card. When you’re not scanning, you can pop it into your camera and transmit photos wirelessly from it.)

When you unpack the silver plastic Mobile Scanner (it comes with an attractive black carrying case), the only setup is inserting the Eye-Fi card — a 4-gigabyte model — into a slot on the back and charging up the scanner’s built-in battery, either from a wall outlet or from your computer’s USB jack.

There are only two buttons: Power and Mode, which lets you choose which kind of scan you want: a color photo, a black-and-white PDF document or a color PDF document.

Once you’ve made your selection, you feed your photo or paper into the front slot. The scanner gives you a couple of seconds to get the thing straight, and then slurps the sheet in with satisfying speed, grip and confidence.

If you’re in one of the PDF modes, the scanner gives you 10 seconds to feed it the next sheet of a multipage document. The result is a single PDF document with multiple pages. Nice.

The scans are clean, straight and sharp. You’d have a hard time telling them apart from the work of a big-footprint desktop flatbed home scanner.

Except that this time, they’re appearing on the screen of your phone, tablet or laptop — wirelessly.

In other words, Xerox has done a beautiful job of making its machine solid, simple and competent. Unfortunately, you can’t say the same for its partner, the Eye-Fi card.

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The Xerox Mobile Scanner

It seems as though for every square inch of miniaturization this marvel has undergone, its complexity has ballooned proportionately. Setting it up is a baffling procedure that involves moving it back and forth between the scanner and the computer and flipping between the Eye-Fi Web site and the Eye-Fi’s own Mac or Windows software. You wind up entering your Eye-Fi account name and password about 30,000 times.

To bring about the wireless union of scanner and receiving gadget, both have to be on a Wi-Fi network together.

Sometimes you can use the one in your home, office or school. But what about the times and places where there’s no Wi-Fi? Or what if you don’t feel like hauling your computer around with you everywhere you go? (The computer is required to introduce the Eye-Fi card to a new Wi-Fi hot spot.)

Fortunately, there’s another way: Direct Mode. In this mode, the Eye-Fi card creates its own tiny Wi-Fi network, even if you’re out in the middle of a soccer field or at the top of a mountain. It can’t send its scans to the Internet, of course, but it can send them just fine to your phone, tablet or computer.

This, it turns out, is one of the most complex of the Eye-Fi’s complexities. If there’s a regular Wi-Fi hot spot, the Eye-Fi wants to jump onto that instead of using Direct Mode.

Once the Wi-Fi situation is settled, you can begin scanning. After a significant pause — maybe 30 seconds — the scanned images wind up in Eye-Fi’s software, which is available for Mac, Windows, iOS or Android. But this Eye-Fi software was never designed for PDF files; not many cameras take pictures in PDF format. So Eye-Fi software displays PDFs as blank thumbnails, which isn’t especially helpful. They represent actual PDF documents that lie on your hard drive in some buried folder.

Things are much easier on the iPhone/iPad/iPad Touch. For these Apple iOS gadgets, Xerox has written a beautifully simple app called DocToMe. It’s made to receive the photos and PDF documents from the scanner, and they show up as proper thumbnail images. If you tap one, you’re offered a list of ways to process it: e-mail it, print it, send it to Dropbox, copy it to the Clipboard, add it to your phone/tablet’s photo stash, or open it up in an e-book reader like Kindle. (The one semi-downside: DocToMe works only in Direct Mode — not over a regular Wi-Fi network.)

There are other portable scanners, by the way, even other wireless ones. But Xerox asserts that the Mobile Scanner is the only one that can scan PDF documents, wirelessly and directly.

Getting to that point might take you a couple of hours — fussing with the Eye-Fi setup, hammering through Wi-Fi problems, sitting on the phone with Xerox or Eye-Fi tech support. Fortunately, once that’s over, you wind up with a smooth, automatic, extremely portable scanning system. Yes, gadgets may get smaller over time. But in this case, the possibilities just got a lot bigger.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scanning On the Go, Wirelessly. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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