Jersey City company offers built-in scanner

Monday, October 20, 2008
By JACOB KAMARAS
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

If you find scanning documents a cumbersome process, you might be interested in a Jersey City-based product that scans, crops, saves and e-mails from your keyboard in a matter of seconds.

The KS810, the first computer keyboard with a built-in scanner, has been sold in the U.S. since April and is made by KeyScan, a small company headquartered in Downtown Jersey City.

The device looks like a standard keyboard. It can scan pages up to 8.5 inches wide and 30 inches long up to a clear-eyed maximum resolution of 600 dots per inch, taking five seconds for standard black and white images and 15 seconds for color.

"Everyone has a multifunctional scanner in the office, but for random scanning they don't want to get out of their chair," said Ophira Rosolio, the Israeli software engineer who developed the KS810 along with Dov Aharonson.

The product was first developed in Israel more than three years ago and is manufactured in China. KeyScan moved to Jersey City because of its reputation as a growing center of commerce, especially after Sept. 11th, Rosolio said.

With typical scanners, users have to go through the routine of opening scanning software, placing the document on the machine, cropping the image, picking a scanning setting, clicking to scan, saving the file, and finally opening the document for use from other applications.

With the KS810, pages are inserted into a slot in the upper right portion of the keyboard. With one click, the keyboard's "No Touch" software scans, crops and saves the document. Without pushing any more buttons, the device can then send the scanned documents to default functions including e-mail, fax, copy or print.

Pages come out the bottom of the keyboard and smaller items like business cards pop out the top. "It doesn't require additional space or hook-ups, it's part of your computer system," Rosolio said. "You scan where you need, when you need and what you need."

The KS810 sells for $159 and is available as J&R Music World and RCS stores. The company is working on securing distribution at Staples and P.C. Richards