LG Scanner Mouse review

A mouse that's also a scanner: do they go together like a horse and carriage or is LG's latest gadget more like chalk and cheese? Kat Orphanides finds out.

by: K.G. Orphanides

6 Dec 2011

Price

£68

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A mouse with a built in scanner sounds fanciful, but LG's Scanner mouse is surprisingly functional. As the name implies, it's a wired laser mouse with a built-in hand scanner. While traditional hand scanners insist on painstakingly slow and even movements, yet still often produce jagged images, the Scanner Mouse lets you sweep across an area of text or graphics at almost any pace, displaying a live on-screen preview of your scanned content as you go.

Using technology developed by Swiss digitisation specialists Dacuda, the Scanner Mouse employs a CMOS chip to take video of the page you're scanning. The overlapping video images are processed and aligned with each other in real time by software installed on your PC. Once you've finished scanning, it'll even correct the alignment of images scanned at an angle.

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The overlapping video images are processed and aligned with each other in real time by software installed on your PC.

The software also has integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so once you've completed a scan, you can simply copy its text into any document. We were particularly impressed by its ability to turn a scanned table into individual text cells that can be pasted into Excel spreadsheets. You can also paste blocks of text or images and share your scans on social networks. The OCR can handle well over a hundred languages, but can't interpret hand written text with any accuracy.

The scanner has a maximum resolution of 320dpi; medium and low resolution modes are 200dpi and 100dpi. Higher resolutions are best for OCR accuracy when scanning small fonts, but scanning at a lower resolution reduces the storage requirements of your scanned image. This is rather important, as you only get a limited amount of scanner memory, the usage of which is indicated by an on-screen progress bar that appears alongside your scanned image as it appears on your monitor. The largest scan size the LSM-100 can handle is A3.