I Spy Lightweight Portable Scanners

LOS ANGELES -- Here is a mission for the mobile executive on the road: Copy a dozen business cards and several fragile documents without any paper. Sound impossible? Well, Gadget Grrl has a James Bond-type solution for you -- portable scanners, about the size of a pen. Your mission, and you'd be silly not to accept it, is to check out these lightweight scanners at the end of this message.

Ambir DS485 $349 ambir.com

This lightweight 17 oz. scanner is portable and runs on USB so you won't need to find another outlet in your hotel room. It feeds easily so you can run anything from business cards to documents up to 8.5" x 14" into Adobe PDF output.

It scans documents in about seven seconds and can handle the thickness of a driver's license. It will install under Windows Vista, but you'll need to make sure you have the proper driver, and you can get that at the Ambir Web site.

The advantage to this scanner would be your choice of use. If you are slated for an extended stay and need to set up shop scanning documents, this might be the answer. Downside on this one is that it does not work with Macs.

Docupen RC800 Mobile Kit $399.99 docupen.com

For a feather-light scanner, weighing in at 1.75 oz. and slightly larger than some pens -- hence the name -- the Docupen RC 800 color scanner also offers a mobile kit.

Unlike other models, the RC 800 operates by pressing down on a button and gliding over a document. The advantage of this is that you may be working with a crumpled or fragile document that should not be fed through a scanner.

It scans in different modes: black and white, grayscale and 24-bit color. If you scan in black and white or grayscale you can scan more documents than if you scan in color.

It also runs on a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery and holds 8MB of internal memory (which can be upgraded to 1GB) for heavy-duty scanning.