Review on IRIS 5 Iriscan Desk by Bashar Shaffer

Received this scanner as a gift. This is a semi-portable computer that requires a USB connection to a Windows computer. It's easy to pack the scanner, its USB cable, and black background mat into one easy-to-carry package. The user guide consists of a small multilingual glossy booklet that encourages you to contact Irislink_dot_com. There are several unavailable videos on the website to teach you how to use the Desk 5, and a much more helpful user guide can be downloaded as a PDF. The software interface is reminiscent of the "DOS with mouse" environment of the late 90's or early 2000's. Excellent automatic page orientation/orientation and fingertip removal features are available when scanning in document mode. When scanning in book mode, a vertical divider line is displayed to show the position of the spine of the book to allow for automatic pagination in PDF. "Hide finger" and anti-curl pages are present in "Book" mode. I haven't tried the "video" mode used for overhead projection at a much lower resolution. Scanning can be: 1) automatic, with the scanner detecting page boundaries and waiting until you stop moving it before taking an image 2) a choice of two scan cycles, scanning at 5 or 7 second intervals ( many scans can look like a cat's beak until you slow down the clock) 3) manual scanning when you press the "Scan" button on the screen for each page. There doesn't appear to be a Mac version of the Iriscan Desk 5 software yet, and there are separate versions for the 5 and 5 Pro. Michael H is right. The built-in LEDs are very bright in the two brightest settings. Glare is noticeable and annoying on paperback covers and can blur the circle on non-glossy paper pages. I'm experimenting with different cloth/paper filters on the LEDs and substituting the ambient lighting. So far, the winner is a square of single-ply paper towel taped to recessed lights. They run cool and don't noticeably heat up the kitchen paper. Some scans of books with paper filter are impressive. The side lighting with an attachable Kindle Gooseneck LED was also promising. I will experiment with raising the scanner higher above the surface to be scanned to capture a larger page size, even at lower dpi and consequently lower OCR reliability. The included Iriscan software is basic compared to full OCR and PDF packages. Very often badly turned out conversion to Word or RTF. This may be due to a lighting issue. A strange hardware problem arose early on when the software could not detect the scanner in the USB port of a Windows 7 computer. The program would not start until the scanner detection was complete. Win7 recognized the scanner as a camera in Device Manager, but couldn't convince the Iriscan application. Casey from Iris Support told me to allow access to the camera in windows settings. The scanner worked as advertised after allowing access to the software by enabling camera sharing. Now I need to figure out the lighting and find a really powerful PDF/OCR conversion app to be really happy to save my old stash of collapsing paperbacks. Any recommendation for OCR software at a working professional's price would be greatly appreciated.