Arguably the best description of the Visioneer RoadWarrior 3($99.99 at Amazon) is that it's a highly portable scanner that offers basic scanning at an eye-catching low price. Unlike, say, the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula P-215 Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner, it doesn't offer an automatic document feeder (ADF) and it doesn't duplex (scan both sides of a page at once). But it also costs a lot less, and it comes with capable software, including an optical character recognition (OCR) program and a PDF utility. For light-duty scanning on the go, it can do a more than credible job.

One key advantage of leaving out duplexing and an ADF is that it helps makes the scanner more portable. The RoadWarrior 3 weighs just 13.4 ounces, which is just over a third of what the Canon P-215 weighs. It's also smaller, at 1.5 by 11.4 by 2.1 inches (HWD), or about the size of a short stack of one-foot rulers. If you need portability more than the extra features, that counts as a distinct plus.

Setup and Software

Setup was standard for a USB-connected scanner. For my tests, I installed the software on a Windows Vista system and connected the supplied USB cable, which provides power as well as a data connection. The short, but well chosen, list of software includes Visioneer's OneTouch scan utility, both Twain and WIA drivers, Nuance OmniPage Professional 18 (for OCR), Nuance PaperPort Professional 14 (for document management), and the PDF utility Nuance PDF Converter Professional 7.

The scan utility is designed for easy scanning to a variety of destinations with a simple one-step command. File formats you can scan to include BMP, TIFF, JPG, image PDF, searchable PDF (sPDF), XLS, GIF, HTML, Word DOC, RTF, and Text. You can also send scans to your printer, a file on your writable optical disc, or an FTP site.

Missing from this list are any connectors to cloud destinations like Box or Google Drive. However, there is a choice for SharePoint, and you can download connectors from the Visioneer Web site for free for a variety of cloud destinations, including Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Evernote.

Also demanding mention is that OmniPage is one of the best OCR programs available, PaperPort one of the best document management programs, and PDF Converter one of the best PDF utilities. All three programs are well worth having in any case, and if you buy them separately they'll cost more than the scanner. Keep in mind too that the Twain and WIA drivers let you scan from almost any Windows program that includes a scan command.

Performance

As I've pointed out in other reviews, scan speed for manual feed scanners is not usually an issue, since the actual speed depends largely on how fast you can manually feed the paper. This general rule also applies to the RoadWarrior 3, but I found that it scans a bit faster with the application programs it comes with than with its own scan utility.

Scanning at 300 ppi in black and white mode to image PDF format, I timed the scan of a single page at 22 seconds with the scan utility whether scanning to image PDF or sPDF format. Using PDF Converter Professional to scan to image PDF format, I timed a single page at 13 seconds. Scanning to sPDF format with OmniPage took only a little longer, at 18 seconds.

If you're in a hurry, or impatient, the difference in speed between using the scan utility versus using the applications is just enough to be worth taking advantage of, especially for scanning to image PDF files. However, either approach is well within an acceptable range. As a point of comparison, the manual-feed Epson WorkForce DS-30 took 15 seconds per page to save to image PDF format.

Very much on the plus side, the RoadWarrior 3 also scored well for OCR accuracy, reading the text on our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 6 points and the text on our Arial test page at 8 points without a mistake.

The Visioneer RoadWarrior 3 delivers the right mix of features for light-duty business scanning on the go, with a combination of highly capable software, acceptably fast speed, and accurate text recognition. It helps too that the software alone—PaperPort, OmniPage, and PDF Converter—would be hard to find at a lower price, without even considering the value of the scanner itself. If a simplex, manual-feed scanner is what you need, the Visioneer RoadWarrior 3 deserves a favored spot on your short list.

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• Get Organized: Choose the Right Scanner for Going Paperless