Wizcom QuickLink SuperPen

• Fully portable hand-held scanner
• Scans full lines of text in 8 languages
• Stores up to 1,000 pages of text
• Memory upgrades and language dictionaries available
• Expandable with Quicktionary II translation capability

The product description glosses over the problems you may encounter trying to connect this thing to your PC. It only supports a male 9-pin serial port. If you do not have one, you need to buy an adapter. Even then, you may be unpleasantly surprised. I bought a 9to 25-pin serial adapter at Radio Shack only to burn an hour trying to set it up, and finally found, deep on the company web site, an explanation that it would only support a male 25adapter. Now I have ordered a $20 +$5 shipping USB adapter off the Wizcom website. (Don't be fooled by the "optional USB" nonsense in the product description. It is optional in the sense that you can buy the $20 adapter later, after wasting half a day wading through the poorly documented material.) I feel that this company has been deliberately vague about the issues a customer is likely to encounter in setting this thing up. Oh, and I forgot to mention the UI's on both the pen and the desktop are wack.

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I purchased this product because I read and pull citations from many scientific articles and texts and put them in a bibliographic citation database.

The WizCom SuperPen definitely has a learning curve, but I found it to be short. I estimate that I'm getting approximately 98% accuracy now scanning articles with very unusual word content (paleoclimatology). This rivals the accuracy when I type these same references and is much quicker.

The SuperPen makes some demands on the user.

1. The pen must be held at a fairly steep angle to the page; 80 to 90 degrees seems to work best.

2. Accuracy seems to increase if you switch to left-handed mode so that the scanner head is looking into the upcoming text

3. A constant speed seems to work best, but there is little difference between given speeds.

4. The user must develop a consistent method of moving the scanner parallel to the lines of text. The largest error rate occurs when the scanner head is skewed or the path of the device is at an angle to the line of text.

I did discover one little idosyncracy. When the system is powered on, it tries to open the last file which you were editing. If that file is very large, the pen times out before the file is loaded. That behavior can be by-passed by holding down the Escape button as the power is turned on, thereby activating the main menu. At that point, go to the option which permits a longer time-out period and set it to some higher number. That is the only real problem which I have had so far.

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I actually bought this as a gift for my wife, but have seen it in action now and am amazed (she loves it, too). The OCR picks up all but the most subtle characters, and the user interface is really smooth.

The PC software for import from/export to the pen is straight-forward and works well (even with the supplied serial adapter).

In overall value, I rate this an excellent product.

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Once receiving my pen, I spent at least 1 hour getting acquainted with it, the manual and its functions. I highly suggest spending at least some time with it so that you are comfortable with it before putting it to actual use. For me, I found that scanning from right to left was best and just got a kind of familiarity with the device. I found the pen to have over the 95% accuracy suggested by Wizcom after I had spent a little time with it.

However, it did not connect to my computer. I contacted tech support and found that he was extremely quick to respond, even after 6pm. I was very impressed. I had a few problems to be sorted out, but the most frustrating one was that I had not clicked on "turn the pen communications on." He never thought of it, and I happened to stumble across it. So if you have issues, check that every time you start the software. Now, everything works wonderfully.

In addition, I bought this pen because I have a significant learning disability and it takes me a very long time to both read and take notes. I find that this pen truly speeds up the process and makes my life a lot easier.

Despite following the step by step procedure to download the dictionary from my pc, a message "cannot establish connection" is always prompted in the pen. I read from one review that a cable adaptor was required which they purchased seperately. Could this be the same problem I am facing? If so, why did they not mention it anywhere in the book or in their ads? I would greately appreciate some help or advice here.