I received a complimentary ZCan+ Scanner Mouse in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Ditch the Bulky Scanner with ZCan+ Scanner Mouse

Scanning documents can be a royal pain in the butt. First you have to clear all the random stuff off the top of your printer/scanner combo. Then you have to line up the paper, run back to your computer, load up your scanner app, hit the scan button, wait for it to scan, try to figure out where on earth it ended up, etc and run-on-sentence so on! This is why I rarely scan anything! It’s why I have a mountain of paper when the rest of the world has gone paperless. Basically, I’m too busy (or lazy!) to embark on such a journey!

Scan with Ease with the ZCan+ Scanner Mouse

Enter the ZCan+ Scanner Mouse from D-Toi. With this little guy, I don’t have to go through 50 steps just to scan a document. I can quickly and easily scan it without ever leaving my chair! How does this magic happen, you ask? Well, the ZCan+ Scanner Mouse is more than just a mouse; it’s also a scanner. I guess you probably figured that out based on the name, though, right?

Check out the live demo, as it explains much better than I can how it works.


Here’s the really cool thing about the ZCan+ Scanner mouse: it doesn’t just let you scan documents into your computer (which alone is a great thing!), but it extracts the text and turns those scans into editable text files. So say I want to scan a copy of my mom’s pancake recipe.

Ditch the Bulky Scanner with ZCan+ Scanner Mouse

I just click the scan button in the middle there (the bright blue +) and start my scanning process. I scan the recipe and hit the button again to stop it. Then I drag the text over to my word file, where I can add notes, chance the text size and so on! If you have a lot of handwritten family recipes, this would be amazing for collecting them all into a book that you can copy for other members of the family! ZCan+ also beautifully scans photos and images!

The possibilities of the ZCan+ are pretty much endless. Use it to scan receipts to track your spending, finally cull that mountain of paperwork that you’ve been meaning to digitize and more. Plus, it works pretty awesome as a plain old mouse. I was worried that I’d accidentally keep hitting that little blue button, but so far that hasn’t happened at all.  No worries abut the button interfering with the scroll wheel either.

Now, I did have some issues getting the software installed on my computer. I was at the point where I thought I’d have to give this to Jacob for his computer because my Norton was convinced there was a virus in the download. Let me assure you that there isn’t. I was finally able to install it. I think Norton thought it was too new or something, because the last time was the charm. I couldn’t use the CD that came with it because I don’t have a CD drive. The website has software downloads for both Windows and Mac.

The only thing I can think of that would make this mouse any more amazing is if it was wireless. Wait! What’s that? They’re actually working on that right now! Check out the IndieGoGo ZCan+ Wireless Scanner Mouse project to see where they’re at in production.

What would you use the ZCan+ Scanner Mouse to scan? How would it make your life easier?