I picked up this hand scanner from the Home Shopping Network. It’s the Vupoint Magic Wand 3 Hand scanner.  I looked around and found that HSN offered the best bundled deal.  The scanner came with additional Windows software, but because I run Linux, I don’t have much need for it.    Still, I  may pass the software disk to a niece of nephew looking for graphic applications.

This thing is great for scanning anything!  Scan text from books, illustrations and photos from magazines, old photos, scrapbook pages, and in my case, cartoons!

I sometimes use it to scan my cartoons.  Especially my comic strip George.  (I don’t have access to my large format scanner. I’m using a flat bed scanner that can’t anything larger than 11 inches.)  With this hand scanner, I can simply run it along the length of my comic strip and I’ve got it scanned!  Or, if there’s a power outage, I can at least scan my artwork and save it digitally until my computer is back up and running.  Or, simply boot my laptop and continue working on battery power.  Plus it’s portable.  I can take it with my laptop and draw and scan while on the road.

After scanning, simply plug it into your computer’s USB port and copy all the scans to the hard drive for further editing.

I scan mostly in B&W at 600 DPI.   But this scanner handles color up to 1050 DPI (I misspoke in the video when I said 1200 DPI. Sorry).  But I’ve found, for my purposes, 600 DPI is plenty.

If a flatbed scane is too pricey, or, like me,  you need a backup scanning tool, check out the  Vupoint Magic Wand 3 Hand scanner.