Business Notes TECHNOLOGY

Warning to bleary-eyed traveling executives: that gadget you thought was your electric shaver could be making a copy of your chin. Meet the incredible shrinking copy machine. The new, hand-held devices, priced from $250 to $350, are arriving from Japan and slipping into briefcases and little market niches , in the U.S. The battery-powered machines, when moved slowly down a newspaper column or across a passage in a book, can instantly produce a copy on a strip of paper about 1 3/4-in. to 3 1/4-in. wide. They use miniaturized thermal technology to transfer images onto the special heat-sensitive paper, which costs about $2 for a 33-ft. roll.

The first microcopier to be sold in the U.S., the Plus USA brand, appeared last summer, followed a few months later by rivals from Silver Reed and Panasonic. More than 17,000 of the devices have been sold, the majority since November. Though the machines can be tricky to operate and often produce relatively low-quality copies, the manufacturers foresee dozens of uses, ranging from the copying of driver's licenses by police officers to the duplicating of recipe cards by chefs.