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Apparent Doxie One

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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The Apparent Doxie One's software lets you convert scanned documents to searchable PDF format. - Scanners
3.0 Average

The Bottom Line

The Apparent Doxie One lets you scan without a computer then easily send scans to cloud apps with Doxie software after you've moved the scans to your computer.

Pros & Cons

    • Portable.
    • Scans without a computer.
    • Includes software for converting JPG scans to PDFs and for sending scans to cloud apps.
    • As with most computer-free scanners, there's no way to check scan quality until you move the files to a computer later.

The Apparent Doxie One offers an unexpected twist on computer-free scanning. Like most scanners in the category, including the Editors' Choice VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Wi-Fi PDSWF-ST44-VP, it saves scans to memory, which in the Doxie One's case means an SD card. You can then copy the files to your computer's hard disk later. The unexpected twist is software for your PC that lets you easily move the files to cloud apps.

All this makes the Doxie One a computer-free scanner that also manages to link to the cloud, in a once-removed sort of way. That's an obvious advantage if you want to share or store scans in the cloud. Even if you don't care about the cloud capability, however, the software's other features, including saving to searchable PDF (sPDF) format, offer more than some of the competition.

The Basics

Although it's not as small or as portable as a wand scanner like the PDSWF-ST44-VP, the Doxie One is suitably small and light for a portable manual-feed scanner, at 1.7 by 10.5 by 2.2 inches (HWD) and just 14 ounces by itself or an even pound with four AAA batteries. Note that it won't work with alkaline batteries, however, and it doesn't come with either the rechargeable NiMH batteries it needs or a charger.

Key items included with the scanner are a 2GB SD card, a power adaptor, an assortment of plugs that Apparent says will let you plug into wall sockets anywhere in the world, a USB cable that you can connect to a computer to easily copy files from the memory card while it's in the scanner, and a 5 by 7 inch plastic sleeve for protecting photos or other easily damaged originals.

Missing from the list is a soft carrying case, which is a common extra with portable scanners. However, you can buy a protective hard case ($29 direct) from Apparent's Web site, as well as a set of four rechargeable batteries with a recharger ($25 direct), and an assortment of color skins to cover the Doxie One's black case ($10 direct for a pack with seven colors). The site also mentions, but doesn't sell, SD card readers for an iPad, which are available elsewhere with either a 30-pin or Lightning connector.

Setup for scanning consists of plugging the SD card into the back of the scanner, either plugging in the power adaptor or inserting four rechargeable batteries, inserting the supplied calibration sheet in the front slot, and letting the scanner go through its self-calibration step.

Scanning is just as simple. Everything gets scanned to JPG format at 300 pixels per inch (ppi) and in color, so there are no settings to change. All you do is turn on the scanner and insert whatever you want to scan in the front slot. You can move the scans to your computer later, either using the SD card or by connecting to your computer by USB cable, letting the computer recognize the card in the scanner as a drive, and then copying the files.

Software

Although Apparent doesn't include any software with the Doxie One, it offers software you can download from its Web site, a trick that ensures you wind up with the most recent version of the program. If you already have other scan-related software, you can ignore Apparent's utility if you like, but it offers some useful features that are well worth having. For my tests, I downloaded Doxie 2.3.1 for Windows and installed it on a system running Windows Vista.

Like earlier versions of the Doxie software that I've tested, version 2.3.1 is easy to use and also reasonably capable. It lets you rotate images, combine individual scanned pages into a single file with a Staple command (for saving multipage files to PDF format only), and then send the images to various locations, including folders on your own hard drive and to an assortment of cloud destinations. Choices include predefined connectors for Evernote, Dropbox, Flickr, Google Docs, Twitter, and Apparent's own Doxie Cloud, plus the option to define additional choices.

Although the scanner itself saves all files in JPG format, the software lets you save them to JPG, PNG, BMP, or PDF image formats or sPDF format, with text recognition handled by an integrated version of the Abbyy FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) engine. Unfortunately, however, there's no option for saving to editable text format, like RTF or Microsoft Word.

Results and Other Issues

The scanner and the utility worked as promised in my tests, with the Doxie One offering reasonably fast speed. I timed it with photos in the protective sleeve at 8 to 9 seconds. Add in the time it takes to put the photo in the sleeve and take it out after scanning, though, and the real time is closer to 25 seconds each. Letter-size text pages also take about 8 or 9 seconds.

Image quality for photos is acceptable for casual use. I saw an obvious loss of sharpness in my tests, but most people would consider the results suitable as snapshot quality for digital images or even for reprinting the photos. Scanning and saving to sPDF format also worked well enough, and I was able to search for and find text in the files. However, it's hard to judge how well the recognition works, since our approach to scoring for our text recognition tests requires an editable text format.

One last important note is that the Doxie One doesn't give you any way to see how good the scan is until you move the file to a computer, at which point you may no longer have the original to rescan. The same is true for most computer-free scanners. However, it's worth mention that a few models, including the Editors' Choice Visioneer Mobility($75.00 at Amazon), let you connect to your smartphone by Wi-Fi so you can spot a poor scan while you can still do something about it.

The Apparent Doxie One would certainly earn a higher score if it offered something similar. However, based on my tests, you should rarely wind up with the unpleasant surprise of a poor scan, which makes this more of a problem in principle than in practice. The lack of common types of application software, with no way to scan to editable text format for example, is potentially more of a concern. But if you don't need additional application programs, or already have the ones you need, that's not an issue either. And if you want an easy way to move scanned images to the cloud, the Apparent Doxie One may well be the portable scanner you want.

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Further Reading

Final Thoughts

The Apparent Doxie One's software lets you convert scanned documents to searchable PDF format. - Scanners

Apparent Doxie One

3.0 Average

The Apparent Doxie One lets you scan without a computer then easily send scans to cloud apps with Doxie software after you've moved the scans to your computer.

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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