Disclosure: The folks at Doxie sent me this Go as a gift. No review was promised to them in exchange for me receiving it. The words below are, as always, my honest and sincere opinion.
The Review
The biggest draw of the Doxie Go is that it’s cordless, or rather, that it’s battery powered. Cordless does not mean wireless. You do need a micro-USB cable to charge it, and the USB cable is the default way of getting your scans off the Go and onto your computer.
The Doxie Go can scan about 100 pages before the battery needs recharging. And the internal storage will hold at least 6 times that amount.
The idea behind the Go is exactly what the name hints at. The Go is a portable scanner that you can take with you. And while I don’t have a need for a portable scanner — my other scanner is an iPhone — I do like the idea of an attractive, small-yet-powerful, cordless scanner as part of my office setup.
The Go is small and attractive enough to warrant being kept on a desk top, but it is small enough to be kept in a drawer or on a shelf. And since it needs no wires to be able to function, you really can keep it anywhere you like.
Compared to the original Doxie, the Go weighs 4 ounces more but is an inch narrower. The Go is also cordless and has a much more attractive design (no pink, no hearts (no offense, Doxie)).
The Go scans color as well as black and white. The default resolution is 300 dpi, but you can also choose to scan a document at 600 dpi by a tap of the power button. (Hold the button down and you’ll turn the Go off.)
You copy files from the Go onto your computer in batch. You plug in the USB cable (or you can connect a USB thumb drive or photo card to the Go) and then import the files via Doxie’s own Mac app.
The Doxie software is akin to a simplified iPhoto. I don’t know why, but I half expected the Doxie Mac app to be found wanting. To my delight, I found it was quite the opposite. The app is easy to use, minimal, and it makes importing a cinch.
I’m more than pleased with the quality of the 300-dpi scanned documents. Once the files are imported you can quickly and easily make adjustments if you need to, but I found the auto adjustments that the Doxie app makes were often perfect the first time. If the app auto-adjusts incorrectly, you can re-adjust manually.
It is also relatively easy to name your files (since the scanner doesn’t know what to name them). A clever idea once OCR is implemented would be to auto name the file based on the first line of the document scanned.
The Go treats every single scanned page as it’s own document. And so, within the app is a vital function: you can select multiple files and then “staple” them together with a click. It could not be easier to join multiple scans into a single PDF document.
You can save the scans to you computer or just leave the files in the Doxie app. Unsaved Doxie scans stay in the Doxie app whereas saved scans can be removed from the app when you quit or kept in there indefinitely. You cannot import documents from your computer into the Doxie app. Thus, once you remove a scan from the Doxie app there is no way to get it back into the app other than printing it out and re-scanning it in.
I prefer to save my scans as PDFs. Mostly because I am scanning in documents that I no longer have to keep in a filing cabinet. The default when you hit Command+S is to save as a JPEG. However, Shift+Command+S is the hotkey for Save as PDF, and Option+Command+S for save as a PNG. I like Saving as a PDF because PDFpen can then OCR the document and then I save in Yojimbo. It’s amazing how once a PDF has been OCRed the contents of that PDF are completely searchable. It makes going paperless seem like a no-brainer.
And in my estimation, the Go’s file sizes are quite reasonable. A PDF of my 8.5×14″ Car Insurance Declarations page scanned at 300 dpi, saved at medium-quality, and then OCRed via PDFpen, weighed in at 1.2 megabytes. That is certainly more than a PDF from the source, but it is not bad for a large page that is high-resolution and has searchable, selectable, text.
Welcome to your new paperless office, Shawn.
