Scanner pens, was: Re: Best app for collecting information

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3825

Posted by pma
2005-08-19 11:42:39

Hi Graham

>Do scanner pens have built in OCR?

As far as I understand there are two kinds of scanner pens (if I’m wrong, please somebody correct me):

Without display. Must be connected to the USB on the computer, and the OCR is on the computer (comes with the pen, that is, the OCR, not the computer)
With a display. Can be used away from the computer, and then connected to the computer when you come home. They have OCR built in. And sometimes dictionaries, as well as synthetic voice.

All scanner pens take a line at a time, and as I can understand from the reviews, they are not so easy to hold correctly, in the right angle, etc.

Then there is the “top of pop”, the DocuPen, where you scan the whole width of the page at a time. This gets the best reviews and is by far the most preferred, according to amazon.com (“those who considered this product finally bought this product” or something like that).
However, for exactly picking up snippets from articles, I would think that the principle of letter-by-letter would work best.

I got the idea from a guy on the Reference Manager list, who uses the IRIS pen. He is quite well satisfied, but when I look at the reviews, both professional and user reviews, there seemed to be a problem with virtually all the pens with the letter recognition rate. Indeed, on Amazon, the user reviews are very mixed on each product, somebody being absoluty satisfied, and others having discarded it, because it didn’t work in practice.

/Peter.

Back to archived message list