4. Pandigital Photolink One-Touch Scanner

The Pandigital Photolink One-Touch Scanner is the perfect companion to a digital photo frame.  Without switching on your computer, it allows you to automatically copy printed photos onto a memory card which you can then slide into your digital frame.

It takes up very little room on your desk but is very easy to use.  We think it's a great idea for those who sometimes struggle with technology: you can go straight from a traditional paper album to a digital photo frame without anything in between very quickly.  It's also very small: At just a tenth of the length of the Epson V30 and 25 times less voluminous, the One-Touch Scan doesn't make its presence felt.

As its name suggests, it's very simple to use, with just one button needed to start scanning.  All you have to do first is slide the photo you want to digitie into a the plastic folder that's supplied before running it through the scanner.

Speed

• Pandigital PANSCN01...
• • NextWarehouse.com
  • $106.69
• • Limited Goods PG East
  • $113.53

Scanning a photo at 300 dpi then takes just 9 seconds, which is a good result.  Like this model, most flatbed scanners do this task in around 10 seconds.

Quality

Original

What to look out for: Orange tones that are hard to reproduce, details in the hair, skin tones.

Scanner

A lot of details have disappeared.  The wood looks reddish-orange, and the face is pale, although the cheeks still look red.  There are no longer any details in the hair.

There is a significant loss of quality, much more so than with a flatbed scanner, whether or not it's part of a multifunction printer.  But is that a problem?  Well, if you're looking to archive your photos on your computer, then yes.  If you have stacks of prints that you want to digitize and keep forever, then other scanners will do a better job.  If, on the other hand, you just want to include a few older snaps on your digital photo frame, then go for it--there's no point in pretending that their screens are good enough quality for these defects to be visible anyways.

Indeed, the screens on most digital photo frames are awful.  Poorly configured with narrow viewing angles and low contrast ratios, it won't be the detail that this scanner wipes out that will cause problems.  Given that it makes almost all colors lighter than they should be, it might even improve the brightness.

Despite being an entry-level scanner, the One-Touch still went through our full set of tests:  On the top row are the colors it produced, while on the bottom are the ideal colors that were on the original test card.

The lack of contrast and brightness is very obvious: the black is no longer black, the red becomes orange, as does the yellow, the blue becomes purple and so on.

When it's converted into numbers, the average discrepancy is about 11%. By comparison, most flatbed scanners are closer to 6%.  

This scanner is an interesting concept, but the next model will need to improve its color handling.  We're looking forward to it!

In the meantime, though, our score might seem a little harsh.  If the test was entirely 'scanning photos to display on a digital photo frame', then this product would climb to three--or even four--stars, especially while the display quality on photo frames doesn't seem to be improving.  However, the manufacturer claims that this is a product that can be used for archiving photos on a computer, and that's just not the case: it's too basic for that.

Pandigital Photolink One-Touch Scanner
Pros	Cons
No computer of software required Very small Fast scanning Easy to use Stores scans on a memory card	Poor color handling Loss of detail

The One-Touch Scanner has a good ideas at its heart: making scanning easy. It's perfect for adding snaps to your digital photo frame, but it won't do for archiving prints on your computer as the quality just isn't good enough.