Iris USOA400 IRISPen Express 6 Pen Scanner

List Price: $129.99 Discount Price: $109.99

Features:

• Portable, pen-size scanner with OCR recognizes 128 languages
• Recognizes alphanumeric characters, numeric data, mathematical symbols, currency symbols, and much more; scans small images
• Scans up to 3.15 inches per second
• Mac and PC compatible; powers off USB port
• Automatically recognizes mix of Western and Greek or Cyrillic languages; optionally reads Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean

Customer Reviews:

It depends on what you're doing [Posted on 2008-03-29]
I edit a small-town weekly newspaper, and in slow times, I like to have a story regarding some aspect of the town's history ready to go in as filler. So I spend quite a bit of time going through yellowed newspaper archives, and bought this toy to see if I could cut down on my retyping time. The result? Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. I find you have to recalibrate every time you start scanning a different newspaper page, and that the scanner works better on pages that still have good contrast, which is to say have not become too yellowed. The good news is that I get about 95 percent accuracy on unyellowed newsprint, so it works for me then; the bad news is that the error rate greatly rises when the contrast drops, so that retyping is still faster on most of the old stuff. But, it should be noted, I'm conducting a Pen Scanner Torture Test; I find it works just fine on better quality paper, such as book and magazines. But always, always, recalibrate first.

quite useful [Posted on 2008-04-27]
The IRISpen is easy to install, but its usage took me some getting used to. After this short period of learning how to aim and how fast to move it has become quite useful. The user interface (on my Mac) is fine, but it takes a somewhat large area on my laptop screen.
I use it for book citations, that works fairly well, depends on the layout and bending of the pages. It works great for newspaper clipping. The OCR hit-rate is amazing for such a small device.
All other features but OCR are not in my scope, and I also never tried them.

Hard to control at the beginning, but very useful after familiar [Posted on 2008-05-31]
It is hard to control at the beginning, but after familiar the way how to scan the paper, it is very useful. Remember, to be patient at the beginning. Under this price, you can't expect it has spell check, this already saved me a lot of times to write notes.

"A" for effort [Posted on 2008-06-18]
Although not seamless (like voice recognition typing) it gets a "A" for effort. Given the proof reading and editing that you will have to do; you could say it's easier and quicker to type the text in. But for me, it's not to unlike the ritual of tea drinking - sure I can just grab the tea and take a shot etc and go about my business. But instead, I get to use technology to surgically craft my typing (Farfugnugen) giving me a temporary "reprieve" from my intensive studying.

The bottom line is - is that some letters get lost in translation - and of course you gotta then go through what you just scanned (word for word) comparing it to the book you just scanned from, because you "of course" want it to be a carbon copy (otherwise, why are you scanning in the first place).

Now, would that whole process be faster than typing? I don't think so - but - dose it give you a break from intensive concentration on you're studying? Yes, it dose that - kinda like - stop and smell the roses and enjoy technology. And of course, someday who knows what they will have that will blow everybody's mind away. So in closing, will it be something your life revolves around (probably not) but will it make a nice addition to your toy chest? YOU BET, right on, the thing is, like, pretty cool in it's own way - my toy chest wouldn't be caught dead without it....

High Quality - IRISPen Express 6 Does What It Says It Does [Posted on 2008-07-04]
I bought the IRISPen Express 6 to lessen the demand of compiling information from several written sources during my research for my doctorate. There is a learning curve, but once I practiced, the IRISPen became a wonderful tool that reduced the time I would have spent retyping my research. With practice, I can scan references in APA style with few errors. One warning...be vigilant. There are a few small glitches that can foil your attempts for perfection (an errant dash or period).

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