Thanks to their portability and simple operation, manual-feed scanners are popular with those who handle documents on the move. Pentax adds another one to the market in the form of the DSmobile 600.

As is the norm for these scanners, a single USB connection is used for power and data transfer, which makes them perfect for attaching to a notebook. A control button acts as a shortcut to the DSmobile software supplied; alternatively, you can specify your own application.

After a quick calibration routine the scanner is ready to use and, being Twain-compatible, it will work with most software. A small application is provided to save scanned documents automatically as PDFs, along with the rather more powerful Pagemanager 7.

Pagemanager keeps track of all your scanned documents for easy access, as well as offering shortcuts to send scans to common applications, making it easy to email, edit or print with a couple of clicks of the mouse.

Performance is adequate. It accepts paper up to 0.8mm thick and we found times varied from just over a minute for a full-sized A4 photo at top resolution, down to just over 10 seconds for a black and white text document.

One issue that we’ve experienced in the past with these types of scanners is that the motor mechanism to drag the paper through the device isn’t always very smooth. This can often result in jagged blur effects cropping up through the image or text. While you still need to line up the document carefully when you initially feed it into the scanner, the action here is pretty smooth and leaves you with a fairly accurate image.

Overall, the DSmobile 600 from Pentax is a perfectly capable pocket scanner for those frequently on the move and comes with decent software support, good compatibility and pretty consistent results. But if you’re after professiona l-quality scans you’ll need to invest in a traditional flatbed scanner.