VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Review
Pros: Interesting Concept
Cons: Poor scan quality, very difficult to use, no character recognition
Manufacturer: VuPoint Solutions
Our Verdict
Compare to Similar Products
 This Product
VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awards |  |  |  | ||
| Price | $70 List | $495 List $399.99 at Amazon | $110 List $99.99 at Amazon | $0 List | $100 List |
Overall Score  |
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| Star Rating | |||||
| Pros | Interesting Concept | Fast, high-quality scans, easy to use, touch screen interface, 50 page feed tray | Great scan quality, small and portable, simple operation, good OCR | Now available for free, high quality scans, great text recognition | Excellent photo scan quality, easy setup, relatively inexpensive |
| Cons | Poor scan quality, very difficult to use, no character recognition | Expensive, Optical Character Recognition not perfect | Slow | Slow and laborious for multi-page documents | Software can be a bit clunky, very slow for long text documents |
| Bottom Line | Poor scan quality in a difficult to use package, you'd be much better off using a phone app | The fastest, most fully-featured, easy to use, and highest quality scanner we've tested | A great balance between performance, quality, and portability, all at a reasonable price | A perfect free option for those that occasionally scan shorter documents and receipts | An excellent and reasonably inexpensive flatbed option for digitizing documents and photos |
| Rating Categories | VuPoint Solutions M... | Fujitsu ScanSnap iX... | Brother DS-640 | Scanner Pro App | Epson Perfection V39 |
| Scanning Performance (35%) | |||||
| Speed (30%) | |||||
| Software (20%) | |||||
| User Friendliness (15%) | |||||
| Specs | VuPoint Solutions M... | Fujitsu ScanSnap iX... | Brother DS-640 | Scanner Pro App | Epson Perfection V39 |
| Paper Sizes | Max: A4 | Max: 11" x 17" Min: 2" x 2" |
Max: 8.5" x 32" | Any size | Max: 8.5" x 11.7" |
| Weight (pounds) | 1.0 lbs | 7.5 lbs | 1.0 lbs | N/A | 3.4 lbs |
| Resolution (dpi) | 600 x 600 | 600 x 600 | 600 x 600 | N/A | 4800 x 4800 |
| Simplex/Duplex | Simplex | Duplex | Simplex | Simplex | Simplex |
| Scanning Modes | Color, Grayscale, Black and White, Automatic Detection | Color, Grayscale, Auto | 24-bit color, 8-bit (256 levels) gray scale, 1 bit monochrome | Color Document, Black and White, Color Photo, Grayscale Photo | Color, Grayscale, Black and White, Automatic Detection |
| Automatic Document Feeder | No | 50-page | No | No | No |
| PC Compatible | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Mac Compatible | 3rd party drivers | Yes | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Measured Pages Per Minute | 0 | 67 | 4 | 3 | N/A |
Our Analysis and Test Results
The Magic Wand does not deliver on the ease and whimsy inherent in its name. Instead of a charmingly simple and effortless experience it delivers one of rage and expletive laden rants, therefore we would not recommend it.
Performance Comparison
The Magic Wand earned an all time low overall score in our testing, as you can see in the table above. In the following section we detail the experiences that led to that low score, and why you'd be better off with a $4 phone app.
Scan Quality
The Magic Wand earned the worst score of 3 out of 10 in our scan quality testing. This is a product of the Magic Wand's scanning technique, which requires the user to slide the scanner over the document. If you've steady hands like the Sundance Kid, that can result in a fairly good scan. If you move the scanner with anything less than machine-like precision, however, the scan comes out with distorted waves in it, often making entire line of text illegible. Compare this with using the Scanner Pro App and your phone's camera to snap a shot of a page and ending up with a near perfect PDF, and you'll wonder why anyone would ever use the Magic Wand.
Speed
We gave the Magic Wand a score of 1 out of 10 in our speed testing. We were never able to get an actual speed reading from the scanner because we were never able to get to the end of our 10-page speed test document without at least a few of the pages looking totally unreadable. With the Scanner Pro App we were able to consistently scan 3 double-sided pages a minute, and the scans looked great.
Software
The Magic Wand earned only a 3 out of 10 in our software testing. First of all, the software does not have any kind of optical character recognition, so you cannot create PDFs that have searchable text. Secondly, you'll have to use third party drivers if you want to use the Magic Wand with a Mac, and thirdly it is very difficult to figure out where your PDF files are being saved. The Scanner Pro App is order of magnitudes better, with very accurate character recognition and easy file management.
User Friendliness
As we mentioned above, actually getting a quality scan from the Magic Wand is an exercise in patience, fine motor control and anger management. Accordingly, it earned a low score of user friendliness score of 3 out of 10. By comparison, the Scanner Pro App was as easy as snapping a few photos and maybe cropping them if the automatic cropping didn't work.
Value
The Magic Wand lists for $70. Seeing as we found it almost unusable, we would consider this a very poor value.
Conclusion
The Magic Wand provides a very poor user experience and it is very difficult to capture high quality scans with it.
— Max Mutter and Steven Tata