HoverCam Mini 5

Mini 5 All-in-One Scanner and HD Camera. Unlike your average scanner, the Mini is small enough, and at about a third of a pound, light enough to fit into your pocket. Nor does your ordinary scanner fold down into a .75-inch-by-1.25-inch-by-7-inch candy bar-shaped contraption like this one does.
The Mini is versatile, too. It doubles as a webcam. Connected to a computer equipped with a projector, it can help teachers and businesspeople give presentations. In many instances, the Mini is a refreshing alternative for a slow and anything-but-portable flatbed type scanner, while hogging considerably less desk space. Unlike the flatbed, there's no methodical beam that sweeps across a document as it scans. The Mini captures a snapshot in an instant. The design is clever. There's an easy-to-grip stationary post with a fold-out kickstand at the bottom. Attached to the post is a pivoting telescopic arm that you can raise or lower at multiple angles. At the end of this arm is an LED light that you can turn on or off, and an autofocus 5-megapixel camera, which swivels all the way around, letting you position it properly when you want to capture a picture of a document or object. There's an autofocus lock, and when fully extended, the Mini stands at 11-inches. On the bottom of the post on the opposite side of the kickstand is a USB 2.0 connector that's kept out of the way until you rotate it up or down to fit most laptops. You must connect the HoverCam to a computer since that's how it draws power.You can also view a live preview of the scanned object or page inside the HoverCam software, which you install the first time you connect the Mini to your computer via USB.From the software, you can shoot videos or capture images up to a scanning resolution of 2592 by 1944. You also choose other parameters: an appropriate image file format (JPEG, TIFF, etc.), effects (black and white, emboss) how the file is compressed, and so on. You can apply optical character recognition (OCR) to convert scanned images into text.Inside the software, you can also zoom (using a 16X digital zoom or 10X mechanical zoom) or straighten the document. At the click of a button, you can turn on a secondary camera, typically, the webcam that's on your computer, to exploit a picture-in-picture feature that's potentially useful when you're on a video call. You can use the Mini with Skype, GoToMeeting or other Web-conferencing software. You can annotate live video with text and drawing tools that show up at the click of a button, or capture your own digital signature, too.Scanned documents are archived in the software from where you can send them off to Evernote, Dropbox, Facebook, Picasa or YouTube; you can also drag the file outside HoverCam's software to use in any program on your computer.