Pen scanners like digital photo frames have been on the market for awhile and are pretty straight forward. They’re ultra-portable scanning devices that you can just whip out of your pocket and get to the business at hand lickety-split. Until now, the scanner quality as been average at best and pitiful at worse. That might all change with Planon’s newest toy.

The DocuPen X is the company’s newest series of pen scanners. Disguised as an overly shiny writing utensil, the three pens in the series (X05, X10, X50) include a 200MHZ computer processor and 64MB of Flash memory that can be upgraded with a MicroSD memory card with a maximum of 2GB. They also feature a bright OLED screen, run on lithium-polymer battery and have Bluetooth connectivity so you can easily transfer documents to your phone or computer. And if you’re a brand fanatic and the proud owner of a Planon Printstix, there is a copy function that shoots your data directly to the portable printer.

The pens have a resolution of 600 dpi and feature three scan modes (grayscale, mono, 24 bit color) so images should be pretty clear. According to the site, “Planon’s Crystal Line Contact technology provides extremely accurate imaging, that far exceed cameras and other portable scanners…” The pens also include the PaperPort SE Software for easy document management.

The X05 is retailing for $369, while the X10 and X50 are selling for $389 and $439 respectively. What’s the difference between the pens? The X50 has a retractable USB cord, an Executive Hard Case, and ABBYY Professional level OCR Software which allows users to convert paper documents into Word, Excel, or HTML. The only difference between the X05 and the X10 is that the X10 comes packaged with a 12 V car adapter.

Planon’s new scanner are ultra portable and very nice to look at. You could use it to do all the boring professional stuff that the company suggests like scanning your receipts and health documents or you could find more creative uses, it’s your call of course.

Is Planon’s DocuPen a Must Have or a Couldn’t Care Less? Weigh in at the comments section.