Ectaco C-Pen. 3.0 Multilingual Handheld OCR Scanner Pen (3.0)

Like a few other reviewers, I also am a graduate student. I bought this after growing tired of typing in long sections of primary texts to have for purposes of comparisons. It does take some practice to get used to using, but after several months, it's become easy. Different lighting levels, fonts, types of paper, etc do influence how well the pen recognizes words, but again, it's just something to which you become accustomed. There are also certain combinations of letters that the pen consistently gets wrong ("li" becomes "u," and double-t's are often misread, for instance), which is annoying, but easy enough to fix. Superscript numbers and italics also give the pen problems, the former more so than the latter. The only truly major gripes I have are about recognition of Greek characters and customer service. In my studies, I use Greek texts often, and I had hoped that the pen would provide an easy way to input Greek characters and words. Unfortunately, while the pen usually gets most of the letters right (pi's and double letters being the major exceptions) it generally does a poor job capturing the accents and rough breathings, both of which are important. Also, as other reviewers have noted, Etaco is not exactly a customer-service oriented company. The support section of their website is sadly lacking...anything, really. That being said, they have not abandoned this version of their product completely yet: a new software update was introduced a month or so ago that did help some of the problems of mentioned above. On the plus side, the pen has worked in every program I've tried (Word, Onenote, Firefox, Access), and the software and hardware are easy to install. I've gotten it to work on two different desktops and even a old, feeble netbook with no problems (two of those running XP, one Windows 7). Also, it is very portable, although you'll probably want to use something like an eyeglass case to keep it safe while on the move. To conclude, the C-pen is not perfect, but it will save the user a great deal of time and make research much easier. To me it was certainly worth the money, even though there are many occasions where I still find my flatbed scanner much more useful.

I help out with paying bills for a non-profit organization. I don't get paid or anything, so it's kind of nice to not have to spend more time than I need to doing that. As it's important to me to enter details in the records, I tend to enter a lot of data in a transaction, and then there's just the mass of data that has to get handled when processing credit card bills and the like. Though I've had trouble scanning MIRC and the more squared off fonts, the OCR is pretty good. It can get tricky with the tiny fonts that appear on some bill summaries, but one can often compensate by learning how fast to scan. The button on the scanner that acts like a tab is incredibly useful: scan, click to next field, scan, etc., without having to keyboard. I find the software features a bit lacking. It seems too tedious to switch modes that do things like filter out $ signs and comma's from monetary amounts when the application doesn't accept those characters in a numeric field. The feature works, but sadly, I find it easier to manually delete than to switch back and forth between text scanning and filtered number scanning when processing a lot of transactions where you have to go back and forth between scanning modes. Scanning whitespace can terminate the OCR and I find that annoying. Even with the difficulties, if the one I have breaks, I'll be getting another. It saves a heck of a lot of time.

Ok, well I bought this pen and I regret the trouble it has caused so far. First off, I ordered the pen from two different sellers. The first pen came in a plastic package that was taped together with scotch tape. The contents were just kinda shuffled inside and the cardboard label inside was in backwards. For a NEW item, it was pretty crappy looking. I RMA'd on arrival. The second pen came in a box, you would think much better. Same components but just as bad! The box is small and the CD-Rom install has to fit in diagonally to fit. This basically means the pen and wires in the box push against the CD-Rom the whole time. When I tried to install the drivers I found out that I couldn't because the CD-ROM was BENT! In this day and age, what lack of attention does it take to pack something so poorly that it bends the cd? So not having drivers, I went to the install website and downloaded the drivers and software. I installed them and attached the pen. No Dice. The Pen would eventually show up as "hardware found" but when I went to the drivers directory from the install, windows would say "windows cannot find the software to install the device". BUT that's not all! There's More! After installing the drivers, my trackpad would not operate correctly. I could not longer left click with it. Very hard to uninstall something in windows without a left click. Also my LAN network icon in network settings disappeared. I think the drivers installed caused massive hardware conflicts. So all in all, Lousy packaging, junky product, software actually did worse than nothing by harming my computer, and according the seller "that's just how they ship the product to us". So not to leave out blame, horrible manufacturing company for such a cheaply un-thoughtout product, and of course to those third party sellers. They are trying to sell us something they know is sub-par for $100. They just hope it is too much of a hassle for you to RMA once you get what you aren't expecting. p.s. This is the most negative review I have written for a product (which it deserves) and I have about 18 years of extensive computer experience.

I bought the scanner/pen about three months ago now. Right out of the box, the scanner did exactly what was advertised, scanned text from books and articles with little fuss. Even yellow-highlighted text in old textbooks is easily scanned. There are a few tricks that I've learned. Keeping the pen perpendicular to the text is important. Curved pages don't scan as well so flatten the book as much as possible. Slower is better for accuracy. While you can whip along a line quickly, the error rate goes up. Couple of issues. First, every once in a while the scanner light does not turn on. I think the switch turning on the light as the pen touches the page gets a piece of grit in it. If I unplug the pen and shake gently, it seems to fix itself (so far). Second, the pen scans poorly in well-lit places. The pen, which works by contrast of white page to black ink, basically doesn't work in daylight. While you can shade the page a bit with your hand in sunlight, the error rate is very high. As far as wants, I very much wish it would pick up subscripts and superscripts. As a chemistry teacher, scanning in formulas with the formatting intact would save me a lot of time. But overall, this is a great product. I have two flatbed scanners that get much less use now that I have the C-Pen. PS: I have noted that when I scan in the text, I seem to retain more of it. I think the slowness of the scanner relative to my normal reading rate helps achieve this. That's a nice byproduct of the process.

I was easy to set up, but I was hoping for something to scan in receipts and movie titles from DVDs. It really can't do anything with irregular text like that. I doubt that anything could. I was pleasantly surprised by the click to tab feature. It made me think this was going to work to enter my receipts into quicken. It would be nice to control the size of the scan area with a dial. Some rows of text are closer together than others. It would also be nice if the scan area lit up based on adjust a zoom dial if it had one. The number recognition was better with some programs that it was with quicken.

I was very happy with this product until I upgraded to Windows 7-64. Oh well - this is the world we live in. I figure the least this company could do would be to offer us sufferers a discount on a pen that does work. I emailed them about this challenge and their response was - tough luck in so many words. ____________________ Lots of other reviews get into the details, so I won't bother. Let me just give my opinion of how I like the performance of this pen. I do a fair amount of scanning and use this pen for spot scanning. It is even good enough that I have found myself using this pen to scan multiple pages, although that's not what it is best at. The only challenge I have is when I'm trying to scan near the spine of a book. When the surface is not flat, the scan can go off into left field. When that happens, I simply go back - highlight the garbage - and rescan a bit slower and it seems to pick it up fine. Some have said it is not that fast. I find it almost as fast as I can scan a line. I don't know what they expect from a pen scanner, but all in all this picks up very well, is extremely accurate, and is fast. Someone else complained about having to carry the driver disk around with them. I don't have any problem with this either and use the pen on both a desktop and a laptop. Keep the pen angle about right and you can scan up a storm. I give it about 95% + accuracy (closer to 99% without spine pages.)

I have type of various sizes I needed to input quickly into a text document - type size varies from 1/16" to 1/4" size, short product numbers. The pen works on 1/4" high text, but you do have to slow down a little. The smaller and/or darker the text, the quicker you can go and the less errors there are. If you scan too quickly you get gibberish or only a letter or two. Go a little slower and you get most but perhaps only one letter wrong. There is a definate range of speed that you learn to operate within and if you are in that range and the type is at least medium dark, the output is generally completely accurate. If the image is light you're going to have problems. Also, since the light in the pen operates on a pressure switch, you have to lift up the pen on a definate up stroke; otherwise it doesn't output at all. On the whole, well worth the investment.

I am very, very pleased with this product. I took a chance based on other reviews I read on Amazon and I could not be more pleased. I have stacks and stack of magazines that I take content from. It was so tedious using a flat scanner because it would scan the entire page as an image, then I had to use an OCR program to get the text out. Another problem I had was the fact that most of my articles are printed in newspaper-style colums, and my OCR program could not maintain that format, so all the text would just be jumbled and I'd spend an eternity moving text around. The CPen has been a lifesaver for me, because now I can scan the text I need and it goes right into Wordpad. What's really nice is I can scan pretty fast and the accuracy is exceptionally good, though probably not as accurate as they claim. I think they claim 99% accuracy and I would give it a solid 95% which is more than good enough for me. I was impressed with the wide range of font sizes it can scan. I'm never gonna give mine up. In fact, it actually makes me want to work now, when I used to dread the whole process. Installation is simple, even for idiots like me. The price was very good too. Bottom line, this serves me quite well. I have no complaints at all.

I ordered this item through amazon canada because I hate having to bother with the import taxes and stuff. But, a guy from fedex came to my office and asked my assistant for a payment for gst and pst taxes. On the phone I argued with him that gst was aleady paid for, but he asked for a second payment. Not only did I pay the taxes twice, but I also had to pay fedex on delivery despite the fact that I paid quite expensive shipping fees on amazon canada site. Got rip, paid too much, never buy anything on amazon canada thinking it ships from canada.

Nice product

Das Ding tut einfach seinen Dienst. Habe die Software im Internet gesucht und von dort installiert. Konnte Fremdsprachen einlesen (Russisch). Arbeite mit WIN 7 professional 64Bit