Showing posts with label scanner pen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scanner pen. Show all posts

9/10/2012

Wizcom Technologies WRPBEK-12 Readingpen Basic Edition K-12 Review

Wizcom Technologies WRPBEK-12 Readingpen Basic Edition K-12
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I bought this for my daughter who is in the first grade to assist her with learning to read. I read a number of positive reviews. I now wonder if those reviews were plants by the manufacturer. The product does a very poor job of scanning and is difficult for an adult to use, much less a child. It comes with a devise you must attach to it in order to "practice" before it will effectively scan. The worse thing about it is the speaker, which is barely audible. Great concept but poor quality. Definitely not worth the price. If you buy one, be sure it is from a vendor that will allow returns.

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7/31/2012

IRISPen Express Review

IRISPen Express
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after about 1.5 hours of practice and recalibrating over and over again, this is what the first few lines scanned from the irispen manual look like:
'he IRISPen may be the biggest sensation in computeriand since the mouse \ As efficient as computers are, you have to encode your data first. If you've ever If y-u'veever rekeyed text, you kn(ng and time-consuming it can be.... The IRISPen, a unique product for every computer user, offers instantaneous vaI at your fingertips. Text rec-!nit-o-- -her; you.q want it, w-en 1 The IR nsist- oftw2 coE1P8--nts: a unique g--y-c-eHI'ell-si-e- scan=. ner and the powerful PCR-Il ("Pen Character Recognition") text recognition technology. The basic principle could hardly be easier: slide the IRISPen over a line of text and it is e :o your application in.st-ntJ-.as if-eyed in -ut up to 30 times fas!er. (JP to a 100 characters can be entered per second. Cut from paper, paste to Windows-: can you imagine a simpler way of entering text?
Is it worth it? Spell check couldn't even fix this disaster. I am a very computer saavy person, I don't think I am using it wrong, I think they just really haven't perfected the text recognition software. The one review above must be an irispen employee. I find it hard to believe right out of the box, that it worked perfectly...and then to encourage you to upgrade??? Laughable. You will spend more time fixing the scanning errors than if you just typed it yourself. Going back to amazon tomorrow!

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5/16/2012

Wizcom QuickLink SuperPen Review

Wizcom QuickLink SuperPen
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The product description glosses over the problems you may encounter trying to connect this thing to your PC. It only supports a male 9-pin serial port. If you do not have one, you need to buy an adapter. Even then, you may be unpleasantly surprised. I bought a 9- to 25-pin serial adapter at Radio Shack only to burn an hour trying to set it up, and finally found, deep on the company web site, an explanation that it would only support a male 25- adapter. Now I have ordered a $20 +$5 shipping USB adapter off the Wizcom website. (Don't be fooled by the "optional USB" nonsense in the product description. It is optional in the sense that you can buy the $20 adapter later, after wasting half a day wading through the poorly documented material.) I feel that this company has been deliberately vague about the issues a customer is likely to encounter in setting this thing up. Oh, and I forgot to mention the UI's on both the pen and the desktop are wack.

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The Super Pen is a pocket-size scanner with optical character recognition that lets users scan lines of text and store them for later use. The Super Pen can also translate single words from English to more than 15 other languages, including Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese. No longer will you need to scribble notes on random pieces of paper or tear pages out of phone books. The Super Pen helps organize your life by storing and uploading up to 1,000 pages of text into your PDA, cell phone, or computer via serial, infrared (IrDA and IrObex), or optional USB connections.
This lightweight scanner also allows users to scan directly into supported applications in real time and recognizes a wide range of text styles and sizes including bold, underlined, italic, and inverted. The Super Pen weighs 3 ounces and measures 6 inches by 1.5 inches by 1 inch. Compatible with Win 95, 98, NT, 2000, ME, and XP, this advanced device can easily be upgraded, with additional applications such as bar code recognition and eGems information-organizing software available. The Super Pen comes backed by a one-year limited warranty.

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4/29/2012

Wizcom ReadingPen TS Portable Reading Tutor (WRPTS) Review

Wizcom ReadingPen TS Portable Reading Tutor (WRPTS)
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The ReadingPen TS works as specified.
I purchased this device for someone who has a reading disability. Their comprehension and retention is much better when something has been first read to them. After the first reading, they often can re-read text without difficulty.
What isn't immediately obvious from the product description/technical specifications is that you can only scan one line of text at a time. Therefore, if you're needing an entire page or paragraph read, you'll have to pause after each line and listen to that line being read before moving to the next line. This makes it a very slow and tedious process. I returned it because of this limitation.
The reading voice is a standard computer type voice. Nothing earth shattering but, once you get used to the voice, you can hear the words fairly easily. For me, this is acceptable since it pretty much represents the current technology capabilities of most all retail devices that read "text".
With regular frequency, I did find that a scanned line got completely messed up and had to be re-scanned. You have to be very steady and smooth when scanning a line.
We didn't look much into the other capabilities (i.e. translation, games, dictionary, etc...) since that wasn't the primary purpose for buying the device.
It didn't have any problems with different font sizes/styles.
I definitely could see where the pen could be of great use to someone with greater needs.
IMPORTANT NOTE: No problems with returning the ReadingPen and folks at J&R (vendor) were very helpful with the return.

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3/31/2012

Wizcom Infoscan TS Elite Review

Wizcom Infoscan TS Elite
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I am a professor who spends extensive times taking notes from books and papers. This has increased my productivity manifold. Yes, like any other device of this sort it is not always perfect, but the errors are few once you get a hang of how to use it. I think the people complaining about the product wrote the review before really learning how to use it. Every technology out there, including your new TV, nowadays requires a learning curve and this is no different. For me, it is now my indispensable research assistant! I recommned the product enthusiastically if you are willing to bear few hours of teething pain.

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The InfoScan TS Elite is the ultimate mobile scanner for data transfer, ideal for scanning, storing, defining, hearing and transferring printed text to a PC, laptop or PDA. The InfoScan TS Elite can scan up to 500 pages of text at a time, provide word definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and read scanned text aloud in English from within the notes application. The InfoScan is the perfect tool for students, researchers and business people who need to scan data when they are away from their computers. The pen can also be used to scan text directly into any Windows-based applications.

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2/14/2012

Ectaco C-Pen 3.5 BT Bluetooth Handheld Scanner Review

Ectaco C-Pen 3.5 BT Bluetooth Handheld Scanner
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After seeing all the positive and negative reviews for the Ectaco C-pen 20, I decided to take the dive and buy the Bluetooth version of Ectaco's handheld text scanner for my wife. I was apprehensive because there are no reviews for this product, but figured we could return the scanner if it didn't work.
My wife uses the scanner pen to scan text and notes from her law school classes. She stinks at typing, so being able to scan all the text she needs into her class outlines is a *huge* timesaver for her.
Caveats: we are on Vista as our operating system.
Pros:
Easy setup (make sure you follow the directions; DO NOT plug in the scanner prior to loading the software).
Scans accurately and quickly when plugged in via USB; see Cons for the story on Bluetooth mode.
Picks up the following kinds of text without problems: highlighted texts, text in books (make sure the pages are flat, though), or underlined text (provided your underline doesn't go through the text; see Cons)
Picks up kooky symbols, like the ones I found in some of my wife's textbooks (deltas, ampersands, etc.)
Cons:
Doesn't scan text well if you have underlined text and some of your underlining moves up through the printed text.
Doesn't scan very well in Bluetooth-only mode. Essentially, you have about 2-3 seconds to scan your line of text before the light on the scanner goes out and it transmits to your computer. I have no idea what the heck the deal is, but if the Bluetooth part of this scanner is really what you're looking for, I would recommend you *not* buy this product.
Scanner doesn't seem like the most well-constructed thing in the world, *but* it has held up well so far, so that might be a non-issue.
Overall: This text scanner does just fine when it's plugged in to the computer via USB cord. My wife really does save a lot of time in her studies. But, as I mentioned above, the Bluetooth really doesn't function very well at all. I originally gave this product 5 stars because it did exactly what it promised, but I'm changing my rating to (a very generous) 3 stars now that we've found out that the Bluetooth part of the show is so bad. Hopefully Ectaco will fix this in their next system update?

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1/30/2012

WizCom SuperPen Professional, Portable Business Library Review

WizCom SuperPen Professional, Portable Business Library
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The Wizcom SuperPen Professional because it could scan many pages of text and had an on-board dictionary that can pronounce words. The SuperPen Professional concept is fantastic, but it did not work as easily as I would have liked. (...), I would expect the SuperPen not to be so cumbersome to operate.
My first problem was getting the SuperPen Professional to link to my computer using the included Serial connector cable so I could upload scanned text to my computer. Although I loaded the software from the included CD-ROM on to my new Windows XP computer which had very few other applications or devices loaded on it, the computer could not connect to the pen. I followed the instructions to set both the pen and computer's baud rate to 115200, but this didn't resolve the problem. The Wizcom website suggested downloading the latest software version, but I couldn't find a link to download the applicable software. An email to Tech Support explained that the lastest software version is available at:
http://www.wizcomtech.com/Wizcom/support/updates.asp?fid=139&pfid=177&mid=10
and scroll down to Install or upgrade your Desktop by downloading and running the QuickLink Desktop installation program (4.9 Mb). Click on the link and save the file to your hard drive.
Once the file is saved to your hard drive, double-click it's icon and follow the instructions.
A call to Tech Support resolved my connection problem. It turned out that I needed to have the flow control on my computer's serial port set to hardware flow control. This was easy enough to do. I just wish that this advice had been published in the manual or on the web site. Ultimately, I did get the computer connection to work with the included serial port.
When connecting, I got an error in the Quicklink Desktop software until I disabled an option for Microsoft Outlook on the QuickLink Desktop application.
I'm having difficulty getting accurate scans with this pen when scanning articles in trade magazines. The articles have fairly small text that is divided into three narrow columns. Since I have to scan each short line separately, it is quite time-consuming to scan selections from an article. I often have to scan three lines to capture a complete sentence. When I couple the slowness of the scanning process with the effort needed to correct mis-spelled or incorrectly read scans, it becomes faster to use a computer to re-type my notes than it is to scan them. The user interface on the pen for making corrections on this device is awkward.
The dictionary feature is nice, but it was more of a hassle to properly scan the word in question than what I wanted to go to to get a definition. Perhaps a separate electronic dictionary where you could type in the word would be easier.
I got the best results when holding the SuperPen at a 90 degree angle to the text.
I used the scanner to scan content from a book, and found that the scanner was more efficient when scanning pages with longer lines of text than it did when I scanned magazine articles.
The SuperPen Professional is a great concept, but I prefer that it was easier to operate.

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The WizCom SuperPen Professional is a completely mobile device, which instantly provides users with the English definitions of over a quarter of a million words. SuperPen Professional comes complete with a selection of dictionaries from the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Collection including:

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1/23/2012

Topscan Scanner Reading Pen, HandHeld Pen Scanner Text Scanner and Text Reader, Scan Text Directly to the Computer with Extra Features (Text to Speech, Free Languages, Dictionary and More) Great christmas gift Review

Topscan Scanner Reading Pen, HandHeld Pen Scanner Text Scanner and Text Reader, Scan Text Directly to the Computer with Extra Features (Text to Speech, Free Languages, Dictionary and More) Great christmas gift
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I bought this scanner to replace a spare Ectaco C-Pen 20 Handheld Scanner that had hit the floor one too many times. The scanmarker is much cheaper - less well built, and the actual OCR (Optical Character Recognition) function is pitiful in comparison to the CPen. The one function which does make great sense and works well is the text to speech - which allows you to scan chunks of text and to hear whether the text has made it in OK. Unfortunately, the OCR itself is so bad that any time saved by the text to speech function is lost due to the extensive corrections which must be made to the scanned text for it to be readable.
AMAZING UPDATE: I was contacted by the founder of Topscan on 2.14.11 in response to this review! The problems I experienced are a known issue which the company is in the process of resolving. The problem is that if you scan too much text, the "buffer" gets full and the algorithm does not work well. This explanation precisely matches the issues I was having. The first two or three lines would always scan perfectly, but then a bunch of garbage would seep in making the rest of the scan unusable. If you only scan a few lines at a time or scan slowly, this product will work well for you, and it is much more affordable than the CPEN.

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12/17/2011

IRIS Pen II Executive Scanner Review

IRIS Pen II Executive Scanner
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I did a lot of due diligence before buying the IRIS Pen II Executive Scanner, including all the other pen scanner products on the market. I was initially a little put off by the fact you had to attach it to a computer via a USB cable to work. FWIW, I am using it with MacOS X 10.2.6 and a iBook.
I have had it for over a month now, purchased in July 2003, and I LIKE it. I have primarily used it to scan text from photocopies of journal articles. These are clearly not the highest quality text material from which to scan, but nevertheless, the IRIS pen handles them acceptably. By that, I mean, I get around 85% accuracy. This clearly means, I have to go back and retype things, but still, I am able to capture large quanities of text to use *in a very rapid fashion*. Like one of the previous posters, I do tend to use it like a highlighter.
As a word of instructive advice...it may be difficult to figure out how to hold the pen. Just try different positions and your hand will develop 'memory' in holding it correctly, such that it captures text.
I guess my overall experience is neither the 100% success that others have had, nor the despair that a few have faced. I would certainly buy this product again.

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This portable, handheld scanner provides a wide range of time-saving conveniences. With up to 1,000 characters recognized per second, the IRIS Pen II Executive Scanner is suited for rapid scanning of small samples of text or for taking notes and scanning tables. It can also scan directly into any Windows or Mac application starting at the position of the cursor. Plus, the text-to-speech option lets you hear what you scan, and in a relatively natural voice.
The IRIS Pen II recognizes data on many types of documents, reading 6 to 22 point size fonts with text, numbers, handwritten numbers, and bar codes, as well as reading dot-matrix letters. It supports foreign language uses (up to 56 languages) and is programmable, letting you define two functions that are triggered by single and double clicks (tab, enter, space).
The Pen II provides improved image stability at varying speeds and offers gray scale document recognition. Additional features include left-to-right and right-to-left scanning, central line tracking, multiline mode, recognition of wavy or distorted characters, a line skew tolerance of 10 percent with a word slope tolerance of 20 percent, clear scanning of inverse text (white letters on dark background), and automatic input of tables (like invoices and price lists) into your database or spreadsheet. The idle mode reduces power consumption.
When directly connected to the USB port of a PC or notebook, the scanner supports plug-and-play operation and is powered by the USB port, so there's no need for an external power supply. Support for serial/parallel port is available.

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11/01/2011

IRISPen Executive 6 Review

IRISPen Executive 6
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I am a doctoral student in the humanities and I got this scanner because as I research, I like to copy passages on various topics into my computer for quick searching ability. This pen scanner has increased the speed with which I copy notes. There is a learning curve with this product. It takes a little time to get used to the feel of a scan that will turn out perfectly copied text. Also, I've found that if you take a few seconds to calibrate your pen before a copying session, it greatly improves the accuracy. I am a fairly fast typer 40 wpm, and I have typed out a passage, and corrected my errors, and then scanned the same passage and corrected the errors. I found that the pen was almost twice as fast. The software is aesthetically lacking and not completely intuitive, but it gets the job done.
While this product is not perfect in every way, it improves upon the other alternatives to digitize passages of text from books and reports.
I've used this product with both Mac and PC (XP). It has scanned text easily into Pages, and Word for me.
Customer service was a little difficult to contact, but eventually I was able to contact them, and they sent me the Mac version of the software free of charge via an e mail attachment. I don't really use the scanner for foreign languages, handwritten notes, etc so I can't really comment on those features.

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