IRIScan Anywhere 5 WiFi - Review 2022

There's portable, and then there's portable. With the $149 IRIScan Anywhere v WiFi transmission sail-feed certificate scanner, all you need to take with you is the scanner itself. No cables, laptop, tablet, or smartphone are required. The departure between it and its competitors, the Editors' Pick Visioneer RoadWarrior X3 and Canon imageFormula P-215II Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner , is that the Anywhere 5 runs on a rechargeable battery and scans to a MiniSD card. In scans quickly and accurately, but short battery life and the inability to scan straight to its bundled software mean it falls just short of an Editors' Option nod.

Design and Features

At 1.vii by ten.half-dozen by 2.i inches (HWD) and weighing a slight eleven.half-dozen ounces, the Anywhere 5 is most the aforementioned size and weight as the RoadWarrior X3 (1.5 by 11.4 by 2.ii inches and thirteen.4 ounces). The Catechism P215II, while it measures about the aforementioned in height and width, weighs 2 pounds 3 ounces, but and then information technology comes with ii scanning sensors for single-pass two-sided scanning and an automatic certificate feeder (ADF) for unassisted scanning of multipage documents. With both the Anywhere 5 and RoadWarrior X3 you must feed each page to the scanner manually, i page at a time. The Anywhere five has a small (ane.iv-inch color) LCD and a set up of controls that lets you configure your scans (file type, resolution, and so on) directly from the scanner itself. Yous can also choose connection options (Wi-Fi or USB), also as view and delete scans, from this command panel, making it—for the nearly role—a self-independent scanning device.

You lot can buy the Anywhere 5 in one of four colors: black, red, white, or turquoise (nosotros tested the black model). IRIS likewise makes two versions of the Anywhere 5, WiFi (reviewed here) and a non-WiFi (USB just) version for $twenty less. The Wi-Fi radio allows you to connect to the scanner without a cable, besides as connect to your Windows, Android, or iOS smartphone or tablet via a downloadable app. That said, no matter whether you connect via the included USB cable (which is required for charging, anyhow) or over the air, you tin can't scan directly to your PC or Mac. Instead, your computing device downloads your scans from the included 4GB MiniSD card. The computer sees the scanner as a portable storage bulldoze. Or you lot can remove the memory card, insert it into the included adaptor, and retrieve your scans via the SD card slot on your PC.

Every bit mentioned, the Anywhere 5 deploys an internal battery that allows yous to scan sans USB connectedness or other ability source, only the battery is practiced for only 100 scans per charge, which may exist a significant limitation. We tin think of several scenarios where you'd need to get mode more 100 scans in one sitting, such as, say, at a trade testify (or scanning birth certificates during Piffling League signups). The skilful news is that in addition to the USB port on your computing device, you can besides charge the Anywhere 5 from the same power adaptor you use for your tablet or smartphone, since it uses the aforementioned 5V MicroUSB cable. As part of my tests, when I scanned a few hundred pages with a USB power source connected, I didn't accept to stop once to await for the battery to charge. In other words, it can browse and charge at the aforementioned fourth dimension.

In addition to the MiniSD carte du jour, the SD card adaptor, and USB cable, the Anywhere 5 besides comes with a vinyl drawstring bag for toting the scanner around with you.

Setup and Software

Setting upwards the Anywhere 5 consists of inserting the MiniSD card into a slot in the back of the device and then charging the scanner from a USB source, such every bit a laptop, desktop, or USB charger. The entire process takes all of about 5 minutes. Charging, on the other hand, takes about ane.5 hours, which is an improvement over some previous iterations, such as the Anywhere 2 we reviewed several years ago; it took 4 hours to charge. While setting up the device itself was easy, due primarily to some not-so-clear Getting Started textile that comes in the box, I had a little difficulty finding and downloading the so-called arranged software, and it didn't help that the visitor's website said that included programs were role of the "Box content."

IRISscan Anywhere 5 WiFi

While it doesn't require software to scan (recall that you can't scan directly to your computing device), yous will demand programs for converting scans to searchable and editable text, besides as exporting scans to different file formats, such as Discussion or PDF. For that, IRIS provides its ain ReadIRIS Pro, a highly capable optical character recognition (OCR) program. Yous also get CardIRIS, a business card archiving awarding, and IRISCompressor, a utility for converting scans to "compressed" PDFs. According to IRIS, IRISCompressor can make "whatever paradigm or PDF upwards to xx times smaller" (in file size, of course).

Since ReadIRIS also supports conversion to both image and searchable PDF, likewise as OCR and exporting to several popular file formats, aside from processing business cards, I did almost of my testing with it. Yous can upload your scans to ReadIRIS in several ways, including drag-and-driblet, importing them from the MiniSD carte du jour while information technology'southward inside the scanner, or from your estimator's SD bill of fare slot. When you lot open up ReadIRIS (or CardIRIS) with the memory card in the computer or the scanner, the program sees the most recent scans and prompts you to import one, some, or all of them. For the most part, this worked quite well, just CardIRIS (and ReadIRIS) has no way of telling document scans from scans of business cards; if yous don't keep rails of what you scanned in what order, you could (equally I did) current of air up with business-bill of fare scans in your document processing software, and vice versa. When importing from the memory card while it's in the scanner, though, y'all tin coil through and view your scans on the LCD.

Operation

It'due south difficult to examination virtually manual portable scanners for speed (specially this i) because a lot depends on how fast you tin can feed each folio to the scanner. We also exam how fast certificate scanners browse (and subsequently save) to both image and searchable PDF file formats, but since getting the browse images from the retentivity card to ReadIRIS is also a manual procedure dependent on human interaction, that'southward not really feasible hither. In whatever example, IRIS rates the Anywhere 5 at 8 pages per minute (ppm). I managed to feed and browse at a rate of about 7.5ppm, whether I scanned to JPEG or prototype PDF; the scanner supports both formats. The Visioneer RoadWarrior X3 scanned at 5.5ppm, and the Canon P-215II scanned one sided pages at xiv.8ppm. When I scanned at the default resolution of 300dpi, ReadIRIS opened and displayed scans almost instantly, and the software converted them to both image and searchable PDF at a reasonably fast clip.

I likewise scanned several photographs, both color and grayscale, with surprisingly proficient results. On the first pass, my photo scans came out besides light, but later on post-obit the scale routine laid out in 1 of the several flyers in the box, the Anywhere five scanned our examination photos with ameliorate than passable results, with good detail and authentic colors. It was not, all the same, capable of scanning an 8.5-by-eleven-inch photo at the highest resolution (i,200dpi). When I opened information technology on our testbed PC, only half of the photo was imaged, indicating that the scanner is short on the RAM required to procedure so large a loftier-resolution scan.

IRISscan Anywhere 5 WiFi

OCR and other Tests

When transforming Anywhere 5 scans of text to editable text, ReadIRIS converted both our Arial and Times New Roman font test pages down to 8 points without whatever errors. We got the same results from the Visioneer RoadWarrior X3, and the Canon P215II didn't do quite as well. Information technology managed 8 points without errors on the Arial font folio, but merely 12 points on the Times New Roman portion of the test. Converting text successfully at 8 points and higher should suffice for most business documents, except those containing exceptionally pocket-size print.

I also imported several business cards into CardIRIS, with mixed results. As has been my feel with CardIRIS and other business card archiving software, every bit long as you scan elementary cards with standard fonts on white or light color backgrounds, the conversion to text and the subsequent populating of the database fields were highly accurate, although CardIRIS ignored addresses on many of the cards I scanned. Merely the program didn't do well with cards with color backgrounds, gradients, and other features that, while they may make the cards themselves look attractive, interfered with the conversion. Even when I turned on filters that were supposed to screen those pattern features out, I wound upwards making multiple edits to each imported business contact. Information technology's tough to say whether scanning these cards really saved time from entering the data manually.

Scan Anywhere?

The IRIScan Anywhere 5 WiFi manual portable scanner is unique in that y'all don't need to connect it to some other device, and the Wi-Fi radio and downloadable app let you consign your scans to your smartphone or tablet. Mostly, it works every bit advertised, and quite well. Nosotros understand that IRIS wants to proceed the scanner small and low-cal to make it highly portable, merely if a longer-lasting battery caused it to weigh a lilliputian more, we'd adopt that, as it would be a lot better suited for truly portable (cablevision-gratis) scanning sessions. On the other hand, information technology will charge and scan simultaneously from whatever USB power adapter designed to use a standard MicroUSB cable—even from your car's USB charger. And the Wi-Fi feature allows you to upload scans to your smartphone or tablet wirelessly. The Anywhere 5 has several unique features that makes it worth considering if you need truly portable scanning.