IRISPen Express Asian: Initial review

[Kerim Friedman]

I got my IRISPen Express Asian very quickly, and have already spent
some time using it.

It takes some getting used to. I finally figured out I got best
results by taking a thin piece of cardboard and putting it behind any
page I was scanning. Otherwise the pen would loose pressure and stop
scanning in the middle of a line of text. After some practice I got
fairly good at scanning, but I still think the thing is rather
shoddily made. It should better sense when you wish it to scan and
when you wish to take it off the page. It should also better indicate
which line of text you are currently scanning. It is easy with narrow
text to scan the same line twice or to skip a line.

After getting used to it, I did some tests with English language text
and found that I was scanning notes in to my computer at a slightly
slower pace than I type. Even though i type much faster than 35 wpm,
(about twice that speed when just typing away) when putting in notes
from a pre-marked book I end up averaging about that (that includes
looking for the note, figuring out what text is relevant to scan,
making corrections for typos, etc.). My speed doing the same thing
with the IRISPen was a little slower, but not much. Despite this, I
far prefer using the IRISPen. It feels much less stressful than typing
- even with the necessity of more extensive proofreading. (Sometimes
whole words are skipped, which is harder to spot than a typo.) I am
confident that I will continue to use the IRISPen instead of typing in
my notes.

Finally, Chinese. I have not tested this as extensively yet, but for
the most part I found that Chinese OCR was more reliable than English.
With one big exception - some lines of text would consistently turn up
as gibberish unless I scanned them in sections. No idea why. Still,
this was good news, because there is no way I can type in Chinese
notes at a reasonable speed, and so I predict this will be a
lifesaver.

One BIG problem however: As I just had confirmed by tech support, the
Mac OS X version of IRISPen cannot yet handle vertical Chinese text!!!
You can try to scan one word at a time horizontally, but not the whole
line of vertical text! I have not yet tried to see if I can run the
Windows version in Parallels to get around this limitation, but it is
a big one. They said that the next version of the OS X product would
fix this issue, but no word as to when that would be.

Someone had asked me what software the IRISPen Express Asian comes
with. The answer is that it just comes with its own driver. This
driver works well and instantly puts text into any OS X application (I
think it uses the clipboard, because I use a program to save my last
ten clipboards and they were all filled up with text I had scanned).
You do not, however, get ReadIRIS OCR software. You have to buy that
as a separate product.

All in all, I'm still happy that I purchased the product, but it is a
lot of money to spend on something which still has some serious
limitations.

Kerim

[Joe Wicentowski]

Kerim,

Thanks for this review. I'd be interested to know: What the version
of the software is included with your IRISPen Express Asian?

- Joe

p.s. I'm disappointed to hear that vertical text still isn't
supported - we last mentioned that flaw here on the list in January
2005:

<http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/chinese-mac/message/5221>

On Oct 4, 2006, at 10:43 AM, Kerim Friedman wrote:

> I got my IRISPen Express Asian very quickly, and have already spent
> some time using it.

> ...

> One BIG problem however: As I just had confirmed by tech support, the
> Mac OS X version of IRISPen cannot yet handle vertical Chinese text!!!
> You can try to scan one word at a time horizontally, but not the whole
> line of vertical text! I have not yet tried to see if I can run the
> Windows version in Parallels to get around this limitation, but it is
> a big one. They said that the next version of the OS X product would
> fix this issue, but no word as to when that would be.

> ...

[Kerim Friedman]

The box says version 5.5 PC/Mac, but the Mac version seems to really be 4.8.3.

I installed IRISPen in Parallels but (as expected) it did not
recognize the USB device. Perhaps they will improve this in a later
version of Parallels. Still, I was able to see the "scan vertical
text" option when I switched to Chinese capture on IRISPen 5.5 for
Windows. If I was really desperate I suppose I could do Boot-Camp, but
I think using a flatbed scanner might be a more reasonable alternative
for now.

kerim

[Kerim Friedman]

I should update this review with a note to the effect that the problem
of missed lines (but not missed words) seems to be greatly helped by
turning on the "small print" mode - even though the text is fairly
standard size book print.

kerim

[Etienne de la Vaissière]

>

Dear kerim

then, what is the use of the ReadirisOCR software ? if the driver
directly puts the characters in any application (Wenlin included ?),
why buy readiris ?

Etienne

[Kerim Friedman]

You need ReadIris OCR if you are using a flatbed scanner or download
PDF files on which you wish to perform OCR without having to print it
out and use the pen one line at a time.

kerim