I buy a lot of business items on eBay. Not only do I get a good price (often 50% of the ‘regular’ pricing, even at online places like TigerDirect), I can use PayPal, meaning my purchase price is protected.

Case in point: my new PS-4100 handheld scanner. Press the on button to turn it on, then scan, with one click to start, and one click to turn it off.

It offers 2 sizes (300 and 600dpi), as well as b/w or color. Frankly, the resulting images are so small (saved in JPEG format), you might as well leave the setting at 600dpi color, since a large page image is under 3meg – even for a small 2gig microSD card (which you do have to buy separately), that’s close to 700 scans before you need to transfer them to your computer. But you can safely use the smaller settings – in my test, even the 300dpi black and white did a very nice scan, perfect for textbooks.

Also, the scanning is simple. I was worried I might have to s-l-o-w-l-y drag the bar across the page to scan, but in fact it goes fast – very fast. It gives you a red light failure warning if you move too fast, but the fact is I had to work to move it that fast. If you smoothly draw it across the page in 3-4 seconds, you’ll never have a problem.

I’m looking forward to my next research trip to the library – just a slim bar and I’m good for a lot of scanning. At 25 cents a photocopy, it means a real savings – fast. And I can just plug it into my USB port and copy the files over from the scanner to my computer ready to use.

So give it a go – use this link to start searching for your own hand held scanner, and save big!

(‘skypix’ hand held personal scanner – same device as mine, but different branding)