Review on IRISPen Express 6 Pen Scanner by Chris Endricko

I bought this to keep track of the mountains of notes that I have to take from a stack of books as part of my doctorate. The software downloaded easily to my Mac and the scanner was pretty much plug and play with no in-depth setup required. Within an hour or so I got to grips with the device and found that, all in all, it's pretty accurate. The biggest issues I've noticed with accuracy are related to how I moved the pen across the page. Moving too slowly or moving the stylus will result in some errors. They're pretty obvious, so correcting them is easy, and still much quicker than transcribing the entire text. Generally I find about 1 error per line of text, and they are minor. Most often it skips a space between words or translates a letter into symbols, for example the letter "b" is read as "Io". The big advantage is that text is automatically transcribed in Word without any additional setup. It even has programmable buttons on the side for typing or typing with a pen while you work. Now for the cons. I was a bit disappointed with the design. It's made of very cheap plastic to the touch. It makes it light, but it just didn't feel right in my hand. I also found the cord to be a bit stiff and annoying, but at least it's long enough to have room to work. Overall, I'm glad I invested in this little gadget. I was concerned about this after reading some of the negative reviews but found it pretty easy to get the hang of and pretty damn accurate considering what it does. It's amazing that for $100 you can get a device that will scan the lines of a book and just put them into your word processor. I expect this will save me a lot of time. UPDATE 6/28/2012 I've been using this pen scanner for a few years now and it's still working fine. I'm still rating the item 4 stars because the device has trouble deciphering certain fonts, such as B. printed historical documents, or text errors such. B. scanned or copied documents. When you use the scanner for nice, clean printed text, the results are usually fantastic. It works seamlessly with Word software, but I don't use Pages so I can't comment on how it works with that word processing software. pretty much as user friendly. I am using this device on my mid 2009 MacBook Pro and it seems that whenever Apple releases a major update to the operating system the pen scanner software needs to be updated. I use the scanner a bit infrequently, so I can't comment on how quickly software updates come out after Apple OS updates. Updating the scanner software is easy once you realize you need to update it, which in my case happens when I plug it in and can't get it to work. Overall I'm still happy with this device and would buy it again.