Peripherals forum: I am looking for a compact document scanner. Any ideas?

I actually ran into this problem for many of the people working at my office a few months ago and found the KeyScan Imaging Keyboard Scanner. Here is a link: KeyScan Document Scanner. Many of my employees need to scan receipts and documents from clients regularly and it simply takes up way too much space to have a scanner on everyone's desk. The KeyScan keyboard is a great document scanner, especially when space is an issue. I have used it mainly for black & white documents but I bet it would be great for photos too. Hope this helps!

Here's a link to the main website: KeyScan

There is a thing called a "Scanner Mouse" made by LG, and sells for about $100, that you move over a document and scan it in.
Never tried it or seen results, but idea is good.

...is where you say you need to scan a large number of documents on a daily basis. Most of the really compact scanners, keyboards, mice, battery portable need manual feeding and often aren't particularly fast.

Take a loot at the Kodak range (yes, I know they are in some financial difficulties but I think the scanner division is one they intend to keep). In their small business range, they have some sheet feeder models that have the input output and paper storage bins mounted vertically, which leads to a small footprint on the desktop. The quality of the scans is excellent. They are not as cheap as typical consumer units but if you are looking for good quality and large volumes, you aren't really looking at consumer grade models.

If you have a printer, you might want to consider replacing it with an all in one printer, scanner, copier, which will require a footprint only slightly bigger than A4/Letter. If your "large amounts" justify it, get a sheet feeder model. The space these devices take is essentially stacked vertically, thus saving desk space.

I've never seen a commercial variant but depending what you intend to do with the scanned images, it might be possible to use a digital camera instead of a scanner. Not sure how you would set up a sheet deeder but it would sure be faster than a scanner for a single sheet.