Plustek’s AD450 Scans What Others Won’t

Product: AD450

Manufacturer: Plustek

Wired Rating: 5

It ain’t pretty, and the AD450’s software looks like a refugee from the 1990s, but it can get the job done, if the job means scanning paper, performing OCR, turning business cards into contacts, or even making copies of ID badges.

One of the largest scanners we tested, the AD450 doesn’t win many points on looks. But it does have some unique features. Need to scan credit cards or conference badges? It’s alone among portable scanners in this roundup in being able to handle thick plastic cards easily.

The AD450 also sports three separately configurable action buttons. So rather than fiddling around with software to decide how to scan a document (to generate a PDF, a BMP, or a Word document, for instance) you can assign each button to a different function. Insert your documents, then press the appropriate button, and the scanner delivers the files into a folder you designate.

Scanning to the cloud? For that, you’re almost on your own: You can set the AD450 to drop PDFs it creates into a single folder, and then set Evernote (or other apps) to watch that folder and upload anything that comes into it. But there’s no built-in synchronization with cloud apps, as with some other scanners.

The AD450 may be flexible, but it’s not especially fast: It took about 15 seconds to scan each sheet, plus processing time. It can scan both sides of a sheet simultaneously, but that will add to the processing time. In our tests, it took one minute 45 seconds to scan 5 double-sided sheets to a PDF.

WIRED Scans one- or two-sided. Comes with software to scan business cards, scan to Word documents, PDFs, and more. Has a special feeder for scanning credit cards or plastic ID badges.

TIRED Only compatible with Windows. Slow. Bulky. Software is complicated, with confusing interface. No built-in support for cloud services.