Scanning `pen' soaks up print and pours it into your Mac.
Henry Norr
Rating: Acceptable (3 of 5 mice)
No matter how fast computer hardware becomes, keying in data will always be slow, tedious, and error-prone. Accordingly, developers keep coming up with new scanners and OCR (optical character recognition) programs designed to move information from paper to computer, avoiding the keyboard altogether. The latest such device, Image Recognition Integrated Systems' IRISPen, combines a scanner you hold like a pen with software that converts the type, as you scan it, into digital text and pours it directly into any application. (Primax Electronics, which manufactures the hardware, sells the same product under the name DataPen Personal Text Scanner.)
Handy Hardware
The scanner, which looks more like a utility knife than a pen, is connected by a thin cable to a stand, which, in turn, is connected to one of your Mac's serial ports. Ordinarily the stand is also connected to an AC adapter, although you can choose instead to power it with five AA batteries.
The IRISPen scans only one line at a time. You place the scanner at the beginning of the text you want to capture, press down to start scanning, and roll the pen across the line. Learning to keep it straight and finding an optimal speed take practice, but we soon got the hang of it.
We never came close, though, to the throughput of "up to 100 characters per second" that IRIS claims. Typically, it took about 6 seconds to scan and recognize a line of about 100 characters. (Our average was 15 seconds per 100 characters until we turned off our interactive spell-checking extension.)
One-Way Gate
The IRISPen's stand has a pass-through serial port -- this is a nice touch, because it allows you to keep a modem and a printer or a LocalTalk network connected simultaneously. Making use of this option can be cumbersome, however: You have to reactivate the IRIS software, a process that involves two dialog boxes and five mouse clicks, after you've used other hardware via the pass-through port.
There are other limitations too. For one, the scanner can't share a serial port with an Apple GeoPort Telecom Adapter. And if it shares the printer port with a LocalTalk network, you have to turn off AppleTalk and thereby lose any active network connections before you can use the pen. Then, after you're through with scanning, you'll have to remount any servers you were using.
Soft and Easy
Happily, the IRISPen 2.0.4 software won't bloat your Extensions folder: It's just an application you launch when you want to use the pen. The software requires at least 2 MB of RAM (2.5 MB on Power Macs and compatibles not running virtual memory). The standard installation copies more than 90 files, which take up more than 8 MB of disk space, but that includes support for 11 languages and you can get rid of most of the bulk by eliminating languages you don't expect to use.
Because the IRISPen software emulates the keyboard, it works within any application. The software has numerous useful configuration options -- for instance, you can select characters for entry at the start or end of each scanned line (such as a space, a tab or dollar sign, or even a string such as Tel:). You can also train the system to improve its accuracy with problematic fonts and teach it how to handle special symbols. And there's even a special setting for left-handed users.
The IRISPen system can handle any font in sizes from 8 to 22 points, but it isn't able to recognize the fine print used for many business cards, phone books, footnotes, certain catalogs, and other listings. In tests with a variety of magazines, books, press releases, and receipts, it typically recognized 95 to 100 percent of the characters correctly. Remember, though, that 98-percent accuracy means that you'll have two mistakes to correct in each 100-character line. We had particular problems with the first character or two in each line. More often than not, the system failed to recognize them, no matter how carefully we positioned the scanner. In addition, we encountered frequent errors when we tried to scan close to the gutter in books and magazines that wouldn't open flat.
The Bottom Line
Even though its performance and accuracy are far from perfect, the IRISPen generally works as advertised. Its hardware and software both have an elegant look and feel, and it comes with a clear and even amusing manual as well as Apple Guide online help.
Our main question, though, is, Who needs it? If you're entering significant amounts of text, line-by-line scanning is tiresome and inefficient; for small amounts, most people will find typing faster and easier. But if you really don't like to type or you regularly need to enter large amounts of text a few words or lines at a time -- say, personal data from paper forms, product information from catalogs, or perhaps short excerpts from books and magazines -- the IRISPen can provide some welcome relief.
