I just bought, returned, and bought VuPoint MagicWand scanners.

Here’s the story.

The first one I bought was this one, which is a hand-held scanner wand thingy that scans to a micro SD card. That part works great. The other feature was that you could transfer the files wirelessly. There wasn’t much information as to what that actually means, so it sounded like a good idea.

Turns out that what it means is that the device advertises its own SSID, which you must connect to, and then open a web site on the device which lists the files. I don’t know if it was browser incompatibility or what, but the list of files didn’t actually link to the files – just listed them. Viewing the source, it certainly had the links in the HTML, but something was preventing those links from actually being displayed on the page. Weird.

So, having to disconnect from my work VPN to connect to my scanner isn’t exactly a great idea. Also, the network has a fixed name (MAGICWAND) and password (123456789), which ensures that as soon as I switch it on, everyone in range has access to my images. Not exactly idea.

So, I returned it and got the one without wifi. There’s a USB cable, or the SD card can just go into a normal SD card reader. Only a $20 price difference, but I don’t care to pay $20 for functionality I don’t want.