The Pandigital Photolink One-Touch Scanner is the perfect companion to a digital photo frame.  Without switching on your computer, it allows you to automatically copy printed photos onto a memory card which you can then slide into your memory card. 

It takes up very little room on your desk but is very easy to use.  We think it's a great idea for those who sometimes struggle with technology: you can go straight from a traditional paper album to a digital photo frame without anything in between very quickly.  It's very small then--just a tenth of the length of the Epson V30 and 25 times less voluminous, the One-Touch Scan doesn't make its presence felt.

As its name suggests, it's very simple to use, with just one button needed to start scanning.  All you have to do first is slide the photo you want to digitise into a the plastic folder that's supplied before running it through the scanner.

Speed

Scanning a photo at 300 dpi then takes just 9 seconds, which is a good result.  Like this model, most flatbed scanners do this task in around 10 seconds.

Quality

Original

What to look out for: Orange tones that are hard to reproduce, details in the hair, skin tones.

Scanner

A lot of details have disappeared.  The wood looks reddy-orange, and the face is pale, although the cheeks still look red.  There are no longer any details in the hair.

There is a significant loss of quality, much more so than with a flatbed scanner, whether or not it's part of a multifunction printer.  But is that a problem?  Well, if you're looking to archive your photos on your computer, then yes.  If you have stacks of prints that you want to digitise and keep forever, then other scanners will do a better job.  If, on the other hand, you just want to include a few older snaps on your digital photo frame, then go for it--there's no point in pretending that their screens are good enough quality for these defects to be visible.

Indeed, the screens on most digital photo frames are awful.  Poorly configured with narrow viewing angles and low contrast ratios, it won't be the detail that this scanner wipes out that will cause problems.  Given that it makes almost all colours lighter than they should be, it might even improve the brightness.

Despite being an entry-level scanner, the One-Touch still went through our full set of tests:  On the top row are the colours it produced, while on the bottom are the ideal colours that were on the original test card.


The lack of contrast and brightness is very obvious: the black is no longer black, the red becomes orange, as does the yellow, the blue becomes purple and so on.

When it's converted into numbers, the results are inexcusable:


That's an average discrepancy of 11%, where most flatbed scanners are closer to 6%.  

This scanner is an interesting concept, but next time, it'll need to improve its colour handling.  We're looking forward to it!

In the meantime, though, our score might seem a little harsh.  If the test was entirely 'scanning photos to display on a digital photo frame', then this product would climb to three--or even four--stars, especially while the display quality on photo frames doesn't seem to be improving.  However, the manufacturer claims that this is a product that can be used for archiving photos on a computer, and that's just not the case: it's too basic for that.