First of all, do not connect the power adapter to the keyboard before running the install disc. The user has to connect the keyboard to the PC through the USB cable like any other regular keyboard and then run the installation application. When a green LED starts blinking near the AC power adapter entrance you should finally plug the KS810 to an outlet. Beware that the device supports only 32-bit operating systems; it didn’t run under our 64-bit Windows XP and we had to install it on a 32-bit machine. The company said that they’re working on supporting 64-bit systems and it should be released in a few months from now.

The KS810 worked fine as a keyboard. Unfortunately it has no backlit keys like the gaming-grade keyboards but that’s not its job description. It features two spare USB ports where you can plug a mouse and other stuff. As we previously noted, it’s a sheet-feed scanner – so unless you’re fine with ripping pages out of a book or magazine, you won’t be able to scan them.

You just have to feed the slot to begin the process. If it’s something small (like a business card or photograph) it pops back out the top; if it’s a big document it will come out the bottom of the KS810. The application scans and converts the document to several different file formats, including Microsoft Word, PDF, email attachment, Photoshop, Paintbrush. The output resolution goes from 50 up to 4,800 dpi. The user can choose from basic scanning to more complex image adjustments. The Autoscan mode allows immediate scanning when you feed a document, remembering the last chosen settings. TWAIN protocol makes possible to use applications like Photoshop to interact with the scanner. One of our tests involved scanning a fast food flyer with several rich color images over a glossy paper – the resulting document was faithful to the original. Overall, scanning took us about 12 seconds per document.

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Figure 3: Basic scanner controls.

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Figure 4: Advanced image settings.

One of the main features of a scanner is OCR (optical character recognition) technology. We got mixed results from that. Our newspaper clipping was converted to a jumble text, but a printed PDF document was scanned to a cohesive text.

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Figure 5: OCR feature.