The days of dealing with high prices and long waits to reprint photographs are over. With the advent of digital photography and photo scanners, creating reprints and enlargements is as easy as using your home computer. Mobile scanners are also a useful addition to any photo enthusiast’s toolbox.
The Pandigital Photolink One-Touch portable photo scanner is a special example, weighing less than 2 pounds and doing its scanning without being connected to a computer. Users will immediately notice how simple and quick this scanner is to use. Just slip in a photo and let the Photolink One-Touch go to work.
Fast Photo Scanning
The Pandigital Photolink can easily scan any standard photo size, all the way up to the 8.5”x11” portrait size. It even scans Polaroids, which are notoriously difficult for some scanners. If your photo won’t scan easily, the Pandigital Photolink also features a handy guidance shelf. At 20 seconds or less per scan, this portable photo scanner makes quick work of archiving photos.
The biggest downside to the Pandigital Photolink One-Touch is its low resolution. This portable scanner only allows photos to be scanned as 300dpi or 600dpi JPGs, making it a downgrade from the high resolution outputs of most other photo scanners. While Photolink One-Touch is also capable of scanning documents up to a 8.5”x11” page, the low resolution can also make documents less readable. Some mobile scanners compensate for lower resolution outputs by adding retouching functions that can help visibility. This one doesn’t, so any editing needs to be handled with image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.
Scan to Memory Card
One nice function of the Pandigital Photolink One-Touch is that your photos are scanned directly to an SD card instead of a computer. This adds an immediate backup function, but may also wind up being a hassle when your SD card fills up. You’ll need to remember to save a second copy of your photos after scanning them, to keep your SD card empty. Being able to save photos directly to an SD card makes it possible to scan photos while you’re away from a computer or laptop.
This also means that unlike some portable scanners, the Photolink One-Touch requires a power cord. To make the most of its computer-free functionality, this scanner would probably have benefited from a recharging dock or battery pack instead of requiring an outlet. You’ll also still eventually need to hook the scanner up to a computer to retrieve your photos.
All things considered, the Pandigital Photolink One-Touch is best suited to a very specific type of consumer who wants a simple and quick way to digitized their photo collection. Customer reviews of this unit are very good and it was a bestselling scanner on Amazon for many months until it went on backorder recently. Now that it is available again for purchase, I expect to see this scanner climb back up the bestseller list.
