Scanner
Latest
Bello's belly-fat scanner should inspire you to get on the treadmill
We've known for years that weight is never a perfect measurement of how healthy you are, since muscle weighs a lot more than fat. Subcutaneous fat around the waist is a big issue, and an indicator of a number of metabolic issues, including diabetes and heart disease. That's why Olive Healthcare has built Bello, a body fat scanner designed to analyze the timber around your waist and help you deal with it.
The best cheap scanner
By Ben Keough This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Read the full guide to cheap scanners. We've spent nearly 70 hours testing inexpensive flatbed scanners, and we're convinced that the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 is the best one for everyday users. While it's not the quickest or most powerful scanner, it hits a sweet spot with great out-of-the-box image quality, and a simple setup, compact size, light weight, and low price that puts it in a class of its own. Though it's the junior member in Canon's lineup, the LiDE 300 provides ample resolution, fast-enough scans, and all the same software features as its more expensive stablemate. In our tests it produced excellent results with a wide variety of content, from office docs and photos to books and children's drawings. We also liked its simple, one-cord setup and compact, lightweight design. You'll have to deal with Canon's clunky, outdated software, but that's par for the course with scanners—and it's actually better than what you'd get from Canon's chief rival, Epson. If you want to scan film with a flatbed, Epson is the only game in town, and the Perfection V550 is your best bet. Film scans look great whether you're working with negatives or slides, and Epson's Digital ICE technology does an excellent job of bringing even old, scratched up celluloid into the modern era. However, the V550 isn't as quick as the LiDE 300, and we don't like its image quality as much on default settings. The software situation is dubious, too, since crucial software can't be downloaded and must be installed from the included CD-ROM.
Los Angeles will be the first US city to use subway body scanners
Los Angeles will be the first US city to start equipping its subways with body scanners. But the Southern California metropolis isn't using the bulky, slow-operating models that populate US airports: Instead, LA's Metropolitan Transit Authority will deploy portable trunk-sized scanners that can survey people from 30 feet away at a rate of 2,000 individuals an hour.
The best portable document scanner
By Amadou Diallo This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here. After putting in more than 100 hours for research and hands-on testing since 2013, we think the Epson ES-300W is the best portable document scanner for digitizing documents without taking up half of a desktop. It combines scan speeds usually found on full-size scanners with extremely accurate text recognition. And thanks to its built-in Wi-Fi and battery, you can use it almost anywhere—even with a phone or tablet.
Scanning technique reads hidden writing in mummy boxes
Historians can use scanning to peek inside mummies without risking damage, but that hasn't been true for the papyrus boxes those mummies were placed in before entering the tomb. If you've wanted to read the discarded everyday writing on that papyrus, you've typically had to destroy the boxes. That won't be necessary from now on, though: researchers at University College London have developed a scanning technique that lets you read a mummy case's writing while leaving it intact.
Bosch's stain scanner knows what you spilled on your shirt last night
German technology giant Bosch is mostly known for making home appliances. And at IFA 2017, the company is showing off a concept that it hopes can add a new dimension to those products. The X-Spect is a portable device that detects fabric composition, scans stains and figures out what your food is composed of. As pictured above, it looks a lot like a TV remote, and it features a tiny screen and capacitive touch buttons that let you browse through menus. Right now, Bosch is demoing the X-Spect, which weighs a mere 200 grams (less than half a pound) alongside one of its WiFi washers to deliver "optimal" cycle recommendations.
Epson's new scanner resurrected my childhood memories
My mother likes to post old scanned photos of me on Facebook. Baby me in a clown costume. Toddler me looking grumpy, having just woken up from a nap. My brother and me looking like tiny British royals on Easter Sunday. These photos are embarrassing but not necessarily for obvious reasons. I don't mind people knowing I was a child. What I do mind is that the scans aren't good: Many are crooked, badly cropped or discolored. They don't look nice, and with at least 25 years of my life captured on film, neither my mother nor I have the time to scan the entire collection, let alone fix each picture to make it presentable for public consumption. That is, until we got our hands on Epson's $650 FastFoto FF-640, which can scan one photo per second. Spoiler alert: We were done with my mom's archive in under three hours.
NASA's Martian tech is helping hospitals eliminate bedsores
Bedsores, also known as pressure ulcers, kill more people annually than nearly any form of cancer, with 500,000 cases per year in the United Kingdom alone. One problem doctors and nurses face in the fight against bedsores is early detection -- traditionally, hospital staff can only diagnose pressure ulcers once they reach the skin's surface and have done irreparable damage. The SEM Scanner changes this. Using seismology technology adapted from NASA's Mars lander, the wireless, handheld, non-invasive scanner is able to detect bedsores up to 10 days before they show up on the skin.
Epson's $650 FastFoto scanner is ludicrously speedy
Even though the vast majority of people have switched to digital photography, someone in your family likely has a box of old pictures stashed away somewhere. Birthday parties, Thanksgivings, bar mitzvahs -- there's probably some record of your childhood trapped in there. (My family certainly does.) Add in the fact that there's less and less need to own a printer, plus the tedium of scanning, and it all means those memories are likely to stay offline. Epson is looking to unearth that treasure pile of moments with the new FastFoto FF-640, which can scan, sort and even post your entire photo collection at a rate of one photo per second.
Snapchat is developing scannable ads
Snapchat users could soon be scanning more than each other's snapcodes. The company is reportedly working on scannable ads that would unlock sponsored content within the app. Like QR codes before them, these machine-readable advertisements can be integrated into stuff like product packaging or movie posters. Upon being scanned, the ads will grant users access to item discounts, sponsored content, and other goodies, while presumably providing Snapchat and its partners valuable marketing data about its users' interests. According to The Information's pair of unnamed sources, these ads should start rolling out sometime this fall.
Amazon brings its Dash grocery scanner to the UK
Now that Amazon's grocery delivery service has launched in the UK, many of the devices that make it easier to order food and household items are starting to make their way here too. The first is the Dash, a small handheld gadget that lets you add products to your basket with its barcode scanner or by simply using your voice. All that's then needed is to open the Amazon website or mobile app and complete your order.
The best tech and apps for your home office
By The Wirecutter Staff This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. Read the full article here. You don't need the thinnest, lightest, or most elegantly designed items for your home office. You want reliable, comfortable, efficient tools—but it doesn't hurt if they look nice, too. That's why a team of three experienced remote workers spent more than 150 hours researching and testing new gear and apps, and picking the most office-friendly items from The Wirecutter's guides, to give you a selection of tools that we're sure will earn a place in your workspace.
Disney scanner identifies gadgets by their electromagnetic field
If someone placed your naked smartphone on a table alongside two identical models, how would you determine which one is yours? If you're an engineer at Disney Research, you would pull out a little scanner and immediately pinpoint the handset based on the noise it emits. It definitely sounds a little futuristic, but a team of researchers at Disney's innovation labs found that every single piece of technology has its own unique electromagnetic signal, even if they're exactly the same make and model, and built a radio scanner to read them.
3D hand scanner could give you custom braces
Many 3D scanners are built to scan whole objects, but that doesn't necessarily cut it if you're trying to scan a specific part. Ever try to map your own hand? Yeah, that doesn't work very well. However, recent graduate Pieter Smakman has a better way. His custom-built Curatio scanner creates a detailed 3D model of your hand simply by putting your hand inside a ring -- you don't have to wave a device around. It uses relatively off-the-shelf parts for the capture process, too, including Raspberry Pi mini-PCs, 32 (!) cameras and laser pointers.
Evernote to stop selling notebooks, scanners and socks
Evernote is still one of the most popular and fully-featured note-taking apps, however as a business it's been struggling of late. Following extensive layoffs and the departure of its long-time CEO Phil Libin, the company is cutting back on nonessential projects. The latest is Evernote Market, an online store where it sells physical goods such as "smart" notebooks, scanners and styluses. Most of these are complimentary to its software, making it easier to transfer handwritten notes. While useful for users, the entire initiative was probably a distraction for Evernote.
Stanford scientists get a little closer to a medical tricorder
Being able to identify problems with a person's body without subjecting them to invasive procedures is the fantasy of all Star Trek doctors. There's even a prize offering a fortune to anyone who can effectively recreate the tricorder technology out in the real world. Now, Stanford scientists think that they've developed a system that, in time, could be used to spot cancerous tumors from a foot away.
Court orders TSA to set rules for full-body airport scanners
Did you think the Transport Security Administration was reckless when it started installing full-body scanners at airports several years ago? So did the Competitive Enterprise Institute -- and the libertarian think tank just won a legal victory that could make the TSA clean up its act. In the wake of a lawsuit, the US Court of Appeals has ordered the TSA to finalize a rulemaking schedule for the scanners by November 22nd. The agency was supposed to have established rules for the scanners before it even installed them, but it has dragged its heels ever since -- even a 2011 order to "promptly" establish rules didn't do much. With this ruling, the TSA doesn't have much of a choice.
MIT's newest 3D printer spouts 10 materials at a time
One of the biggest hindrances to current 3D printers is that they almost exclusively stick to a single precursor be it plastic, metal or glass. At most, you can get one that extrudes three materials at a time and they're going set you back a quarter of a million dollars. However, a team of researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have debuted a novel solution that allows users to create more complex items in a fraction of the time and cost by printing up to ten different materials simultaneously.
Microsoft wants you to scan in 3D using only your phone
If you want to do some 3D scanning, you usually have to get either a dedicated scanner or a less-than-elegant add-on. Microsoft Research and the University of Oxford think there's a better way, though. Their MobileFusion project captures 3D models using only an app on your smartphone. The software scans objects by comparing image frames from your phone's camera and creating stereo depth maps from the results -- you just have to walk around an object to get more detail. It's much like Kinect Fusion, but you're not tied to either a PC or a clunky peripheral.
Office Lens for Android is ready to scan your documents
Need to quickly capture that taxi receipt, or the notes from a meeting? You can now pull out your Android phone to do it. After several weeks of testing, Microsoft has released the finished version of Office Lens for Google-powered devices. As a recap, Office Lens' party trick is its ability to scan all kinds of documents (even at less-than-ideal angles) and translate them into usable files on OneDrive and OneNote -- it'll even make text searchable. The complete Lens app should work on a wide range of devices, so you'll definitely want to swing by Google Play if you're eager to give this scanner a spin.
