| Product: HP CapShare 910/920 |
Company: Hewlett-Packard |
| Web: www.capshare.com |
Phone: ??? |
| Platform: Win95/98/NT/CE/Psion |
SRP: $500
Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
I've had the HP CapShare 910 since I saw it at the PDA show last spring. The idea behind it is really cool, but I have to admit the implimentation is not ready for prime time. I would have written a review sooner but I was REALLY REALLY hoping to find a worthy application for this little gizmo.
The CapShare is a small handheld scanner. You swipe it in a U-shaped path over a letter size piece of paper and it will copy the page as an image. You can then send the image via serial connection or an infrared connection to your Windows laptop or other portable device. The desktop software will spit out either a TIFF file or an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. I started out with the older 910, but upgraded the software and firmware to the 920. Both share the same hardware.
The product is targeted at mobile professionals who need to copy and share documents, email and fax them. I found the capture process hard to master, and it took several tries to completely capture a page. Transferring the file to my PC was a snap, and works flawlessly, provided you have an available serial or infrared port. The product does work, but I was at a loss to find a really compelling use for it that made it worth the $500.
I thought it would be cool for me in my role as a student because I could copy pages from books and avoid the long lines at the expensive university library's copy machine. Nope. The CapShare could not accommodate the pages as they curve towards the spine.
I thought it would be cool to capture documents at trade shows, but after taking the machine to several, I found it took so many swipes to successfully capture a single page, that the CapShare sat at the bottom of my bag, unused, and I ended up schleping the CapShare AND all that paper around.
I can think of one scenario where it would be useful. You're a salesperson. You close the deal, sign the contract, capture the document, beam it to your laptop and email it as a PDF to the home office, bypassing expensive hotel fax charges.
Still, for the majority of us, this product might be useful if it were a little more forgiving, cheaper and more flexible. The student market alone is worth pursuing. As it is now CapShare 910/920 is an expensive solution in search of a problem.
- Eric Diamond [12/29/99]
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