BOOSTING YOUR INTERNET SPEED

“This morning it took about four minutes to download the newspaper,” a reader wrote. “Usually, it’s only seconds.” Neither of us could figure it out, so he called his internet service, Xfinity. They said the problem was his wiring. But why, he wondered, would his download speed be 20 Mbps one day and 500 Mbps the next? After a runaround, he gave up on Xfinity and signed up for AT&T’s fiber optics service. He’s very happy with it. I like AT&T too. But I switched to Xfinity last summer when I found an unbeatable deal: internet service for $5 a month and cell service for $15 a month. But I had a heck of a time getting Xfinity to acknowledge […]

Read more

ONE REAL FAST PHOTO SCANNER

Our new Epson “FastFoto” scanner sucked in photos so fast it made us laugh. Put a stack in, and the photos jump through the scanner like they’ve been shot out of a cannon. Typical speed is one a second. Then we asked ourselves the big question: Why get a photo scanner when ScanMyPhotos.com will do it for you?  For instance, they’ll currently scan a thousand 4- by-6-inch photos for $50. No muss, no fuss. So here’s why your own scanner might be more useful: A scanned photo, sent by email or shared on Facebook, is often a spur of the moment thing. Reach your hand into an old collection, pull out a stack and put them in the FastFoto scanner. […]

Read more

THE END OF PRINTED TEXTBOOKS?

If your college textbook is available online, it’s probably a lot cheaper than the printed version. In fact, scanning books to put them online for sale sounds like a good business. Unfortunately, an advanced scanner costs $20,000, and of course there are copyright problems.

Read more

USING YOUR CAMERA TO SCAN DOCUMENTS

“Turboscan” was suggested by a doctor who reads our column. He said it’s good for scanning a document with your camera phone and it worked well in our tests. It’s $3 for Android or iPhone. It lets you take multi-page scans. Crop the results and you can combine three similar shots to get better resolution. When satisfied, tap the app to email the document as a PDF.

Read more

FASTER THAN FAXING

Joy’s 96 year-old friend Ida had a real estate document that needed faxing. Joy’s scanner didn’t work, so what to do? Well, she took a picture of Ida’s document and emailed it.

Read more

SAVE IT AND STORE IT

A $500 scanner sounds like $400 too much. But the “NeatConnect” is so useful we’re going to buy it. This is our ultimate test for any product: can you sell it to us?

Read more

JUST SCAN IT

The “doxie one” is a portable scanner that needs no computer. Push a button and your piece of paper is digitized and saved to an SD memory card. The device sells for $149 and it can also save the scan directly to the web. The “doxie go” sells for $50 more and runs on a battery.

Read more

SCANNER MOUSE

Ever wish your computer’s mouse was also a scanner? LG is introducing one.

Read more

BOOK SCANNER

Want to digitize your comic books, textbooks and rare books without breaking their backs? Plustek has come out with the OpticBook 3800. We found it offered for $250-$280 on the web.

Read more

SCANNING YOUR PHOTOS

GoClickFree.com and Verbatim have photo DVDs that automatically back up digital photos. Canon has an easy to use scanner for turning regular prints into digital ones.

(CLICK UNDERLINE BELOW HEADING FOR MORE.)

Read more