- Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software scanned documents can be converted to a text file and edited in MS Office.
- Scanned files can be sent as e-mails, SNS(Facebook, Twitter, Flickr), and via smartphones.
- Five button 1200 dpi mouse works on Mac and Windows operating systems.
Tried the image scanning out (it is fair quality for a wand scanner with some brightness variations on the scans). I don't think the image scanner part of the mouse is horrible given the hardware limitations imposed, but the 300 DPI images are not really "print quality" in my opinion, however are fair enough to use for web graphics. When you scan or OCR with this mouse, you have options after scanning, rotating the image + adjusting hue/saturation/brightness/contrast + rectangle crop lines to PASTE IMAGE or PASTE TEXT into an open text or image processing program. That works rather well, but I wish I could also copy images back into the scanner interface to get a usable OCR text copy back. You can only use the images you have recently scanned using the mouse for OCR purposes at the moment.
To scan a page, just click the "SCAN" button once which starts the onscreen scanning review operation (very nice extremely useful interface in my opinion though it monopolizes the computer's screen), the mouse remains scanning without the "SCAN" button being held until the mouse scanner runs out of working RAM memory, or the mouse is lifted off the surface, or both surface tracking sensors are considered "Off Page", or you click the "SCAN" button again to move onto the scan rotation & Image Cropping stage. After that stage you can PASTE IMAGE or PASTE TEXT to an open program or email the image to one of the popular image sharing websites (I haven't used that "Internet Sharing" feature though). When scanning the scanner mouse will continue to align the image slices if only one mouse tracking sensor is "on page" though you should be careful against rotating the mouse when only one sensor is on-page. YOU MUST OVERLAP SCAN SLICES WHEN SCANNING THOUGH. If you do not overlap the scan slices (in sort of an "S"-shape pattern), the auto-image-stitching program will not be able to rotate or align the image slices to give you a useable result. The mouse will fail to scan if both tracking sensors move off page without a surface being directly under it in terms of millimeters (like with a magazine or book). The scanner automatically realigns, rotates, and blends the individual image stitches of the scan slices as you go, but if one of the sensors move off-page + the mouse is rotated, the mouse scanner can misalign these image slices although you can simply rescan over the goofed up areas to correct these misalignments most times. Some scanning misalignments are caused by the surface-mount LEDs blinking off for a quarter-second though at random times during mid-scan when the LED lights usually remain on until the "SCAN" button is pressed again to stop scanning. This could be fixed with another pair of tracking elements on the left/right sides of the mouse scanning glass (one near the camera element on the mini-board the other might be impossible to insert on the right-hand side of the mouse).
The LG Scanner Mouse comes with a fine black felt cloth bag to store the mouse in to protect the glass scanning plate from damage and two CD-ROM discs (one Mac / one Windows so if one doesn't work, the other should on your PC unless you use Linux). It comes with a mouse pad with a translucent flip cover to enable scanning small paper items without them sliding all over the place under the mouse. You also get the paper manuals written in the standard multi-language irksome format (probably will be multi-lingual Rosetta Stones to future generations when dug out of future landfills).
The OCR is quite exceptional though and that is why I purchased another LG Scanner Mouse the next day for my boss at work to simplify his publishing efforts). The mouse comes with an 8+10/16 inch wide by 7 inched height mouse pad with a translucent scan area of 8+10/16 inches wide by 5+1/2 inches tall flip-up cover mouse pad for scanning small business cards, credit cards for numbers (point of sale scanning), and envelopes. I purchased both LG Scanner Mouses for the OCR alone as the mouse function as a mouse itself rather stinks although the mouse surface tracking is very good.
The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) powered by ABBYY FINEPRINT SOFTWARE does indeed work as promised and has a high success rate in function. It will read many fonts correctly on many surfaces without much fuss and convert them into the correct text formatting and words (enough that my next purchase will be the ABBYY FINEREADER 11 PROFESSIONAL EDITION OCR software package itself $92.99 from Amazon.com). It will read white text on blue backgrounds and black text on yellow backgrounds along with most Helvetica fonts, Times Roman (serif), etc. That part of the package promise is 100% true (so long as the image contrast between text and surface is high). It will read fonts on textured backgrounds so long as the texture is very low contrast against the higher contrast text (black text, red text, on a white-beige linen business card).
Let's get to the unpleasant facts of this mouse as a mouse though. First problem is the cord. It is sticky. Not glue or Wacky-Wall-Crawler toy sticky, but not slippery enough to slide around easily on the table as the mouse scoots around and this can make the mouse movement jerky. Second big problem is the shape and texture of the mouse. The mouse is about 1/5 longer than my regular computer mouse though the shiny-polished top looks great, it is slippery. The click buttons are real easy to click. With the slippery shiny-smooth top texture leads to lots of accidental twitch-clicks just in gripping the mouse. The shape of the mouse is an inverted trapezoid (left side is straight up | right side is insanely slanted /, so the mouse looks like this |__/ when holding it) and this makes it grasping the mouse properly painful in the hand's Superficial Palmar Branch despite the rubberized smooth-grip textured sides. I figure the slant was put into the design to allow book scanning, but it does not work for proper mouse holding. With the mouse being 1/5th longer than a normal mouse plus lacking a rubberized spot to rest the palm of the hand on, the hand just slides off. The mouse has 4 buttons and a mouse wheel click-button. One is a dedicated "SCAN" button, the rest are non-programmable (causing severe annoyance from the permanent "BACK" button being near the SCAN button). As the hand slips around trying to grip the pain-inducing design on the top, accidental clicking of the left-mouse button or the right-mouse button, or the "BACK" button becomes irksome & annoying. Let's just say, in the current design this is not a Gaming Mouse (which is a shame as the surface tracking is great) or a CAD mouse or much of an Internet Browsing mouse because of the slippery surface design and the horrible slanted-/ right-hand side with all of the random miss-clicks resulting from just trying to hold onto the blasted thing for any reasonable period of time (I have big man hands 3+1/2 inches wide & 3+1/2 inch palm length with the middle finger being 3+1/8 inches long and normally use a larger mouse and this is slippery & PAINFUL to use over a 5 minute period, gah, imagine the suffering of a smaller handed person or a pre-teen with this mouse).
With my Logitech G9 mouse, the butt of my palm rests on the mouse pad and the left/right buttons are easily clickable. With the 1/5th longer shape of the LG Scanner Mouse, the butt of my palm has to rest poorly on the slippery mouse top or the left/right buttons are very difficult to click. This is the main reason for the LG Scanner Mouse's failure as a Mouse when my hand then begins to slip off the mouse leading to accidental miss-clicks in trying to retain grasping the mouse. The |__/ shape of the mouse means I have to stretch the pinky and ring finger farther to grasp the right-hand side properly which leads to the painful sensations after very short mouse usage time.
Now onto the unpleasant facts of the scanner. This mouse has 2 motion sensor elements (which do make tracking accuracy exceptional) one at the top-middle of the mouse & one at the bottom-middle. The image scanner glass element is to the right-hand side of the bottom with a mirror reflecting the light off the 4 surface-mount LED elements (which only turn on when the "SCAN" button is pressed) with the digital camera element being in the bottom of the mouse without any secondary focusing lenses. You can use this scanner to image through a glass cover so long as the paper is flat and pressed very near the glass cover. You won't be scanning books easily unless you flip it upside down to get the scanner plate near the inner margins of the pages (no scanning easily a book through a glass tabletop either sadly). If you lift up the mouse, the optical surface tracking sensor elements will send an alert stopping the scanning until you reposition it near the last scan location. Putting the tracking sensors nearer to the top & bottom of the scanning element would've been a better choice instead of aligning them to the center of the mouse. Putting some lens elements for longer distance focusing like a cameraphone to switch between MACRO and PHOTO imaging would make this mouse superior or just using two digital camera elements (one for Macro zoom / one for long focus) or using the (GOOGLE it) iPhone 4 Rear Camera replacement ($29.95) element with an automatic macro lens (small magnifying lens) slide-over mechanism would make a superior mouse scanner imaging system (GOOGLE up "Clarifi iPhone 3G macro lens case" for more information). For scanning books, with an improved iPhone image sensor, two easy ways to do that -include two iPhone image sensors for 3D sensing of surface depth (three in a equilateral triangle would be the best though) or a cheap infrared blink element for macro depth sensing. Using the iPhone image sensor element(s) plus macro lenses might also do away with the need for any extra surface tracking elements too if you use them in "night mode" for simple mousing with an infrared light for illumination of the mouse pad (switch to Photo Image Stitching Mode for longer range non-macro imaging if scanning a curved book or using the mouse as a digital camera).
Summary, GREAT OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION (not for handwriting though) FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES (the primary reason I have purchased two of these already and are considering purchasing another 2) with okay functional image scanning, excellent surface tracking, exceptionally workable quick scanning interface. The BAD, sticky mouse cord, pain-inducing too-long + weird right-side slant mouse shape in the hand, too slippery on top, poor location design for the surface tracking elements & too few in current design, needs a better dynamic imaging camera like the iPhone 4 for both macro & photo modes to allow taking photos and to allow scanning open books with irregular curvature. My purchase is to scan text into OCR usable text for quick information entry and then it gets slipped back into the nice cloth sack that it came with in the box to gather dust. It is a good product for the function of OCR or lower-quality image scanning, but really is painful & unusable for usage as a regular computer mouse despite the excellent surface-tracking function by its using two laser-scan eyes at the top & bottom of the mouse.
(This should be my final review edit on this product for clarity & intent, I tend to get sloppy and write emotional "Blurt Reviews" when I am excited, without too much editing self-restraint in terms of functional grammar and conceptual clarity).
Buy LG Electronics LSM-100 Scanner Mouse Now
top tool!I use to skip lots of potential scans because it was interrupting my workflow , now it's always at hand and it includes OCR : probably did more scans in the past 10 days and in the past year (and no comparison with trying to take a picture with your mobile ... !). The image capture works amazingly well. The mouse ergonomy is the only thing I say could be improved a little bit.Read Best Reviews of LG Electronics LSM-100 Scanner Mouse Here
First off; the scanning works very well, even on a Mac (MacOS X Mountain Lion).Unlike those old handscanners, this scanner really stitches your scan together very well, in a very good quality.
Just keep in mind that lifting the mouse during scanning is a no-no.
Unfortunately; this mouse is [for me] not a mouse I'd want to use on a daily basis.
It feel very uncomfortable (I prefer mice like Logitech M510) and unnatural.
Having said that; setup was a breeze, and getting used to the way you scan a page is easy.
In the end I guess it depends on what you're looking for.
Are you looking for an easy to use handscanner: I really can recommend this product.
Are you looking for a handscanner that is also a daily use mouse: I cannot recommend this product, as a mouse it fails.
Want LG Electronics LSM-100 Scanner Mouse Discount?
As other reviewers have pointed out, the LSM-100 is not a particularly impressive mouse by modern standards. I own a MacBook Pro, and even if I were unhappy with its touchpad (I'm not), I would buy a Bluetooth ergonomic mouse if that was my primary need. If you want an external mouse first and foremost, there are much better choices.The LSM-100 is best used strictly as a portable scanner, and in that respect it shines. Before I got it, this was my workflow when I had to scan a diagram or problem from a textbook:
(1) Take book to copier. Press hard to flatten the book (doing no good to the spine) to get an undistorted copy of the entire page.
(2) Put resulting photocopied page on flatbed scanner attached to my computer. Scan the entire page to a JPEG image, then edit.
Now I just open the book, plug in the LSM-100, rub it over the image I want to copy, and in 10 or 15 seconds I've finished scanning, and I'm ready to edit. It really is that fast and simple. Does the image have the same quality that is achievable with a high quality flatbed scanner? No, but at 300 dpi it is certainly "good enough" for most of my needs. The LSM-100 does not replace a flatbed scanner (I certainly wouldn't want to scan an entire page this way), but if you primarily find yourself needing to import smaller images from a printed page into your presentations, it is ideal.
I should also add that the scanning software works very nicely with Mountain Lion. LG seems to actively support their interface and drivers for Mac users, unlike many other manufacturers who treat the Mac market as an afterthought. Be forewarned that you'll probably have to perform at least two online updates once you install the software from the included CD.
Overall, this is a very impressive portable scanner, and it has earned a permanent slot in my computer briefcase.
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I've had this mouse now for a few weeks.Install was easy and painless. I have a Windows 7 machine and it installed the mouse right away. Driver disc comes with it to enable you to scan images. Very easy to use the scanning feature to scan an entire page or just a section if that's all you want. After you are done scanning, you can edit the size of the picture you want to save to your pc and can even drag the scanned image to a word document and it will turn it into text. This is great!!! I have found a few fonts where the software had a hard time with a few of the letters but 95-99% are perfectly transcribed :).
The neat thing is that it also includes a share option to share on social network apps like facebook :). Shared a few pictures that my daughter drew with my friends.
The mouse has a shiny finish on it and looks super sharp :)
Couldn't be happier!
Only thing I wish for on this is for it to be wireless.
Thanks LG :)
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