While many of these products rely on traditional optical scanning technology, the 5th Sense personal authentication peripheral uses a high-res silicon sensor to read a fingerprint. This produces a very high quality 500dpi image, which reduces the margin of error and possibility of recognition failure. Being entirely solid, the device is also more reliable and cheaper to make than other scanners with moving parts. The manufacturer claims that the scanner has a scratch-proof surface and we can confirm that after spending a full five minutes trying to inflict severe fingernail damage on the unit, it remained untarnished. We were also impressed by the spring-loaded dust cover which protects the scanning area from being coated with coffee drops and sandwich crumbs, and it's cleverly designed in order that it can be operated with one finger too.
Installation is easy.
The device draws power from the keyboard socket using a pass-through connector, which is linked to the PC's parallel interface. We would've liked the manufacturer to have included a similar connector for the parallel interface so that the scanner could work comfortably with other peripherals, such as a printer. A USB version is available too. The supplied software is easy to set up and allows you to administer many users on a single machine or network. Each user can have three different fingerprints stored in their database as a backup just in case one of their hands is bandaged.