- TopScan www.text-scanner.com , simply slide the TopScan Handheld scanner over the printed text
- scans 1000 words per minute
- free features such as Text to speech: you scan the computer will speak, and free language support.
- With the text-to-speech (TTS) feature included with TopScanTM you can scan a word or sentence
- Scans formulas, hand-writing or foreign texts in their original style and appearance
AMAZING UPDATE: I was contacted by the founder of Topscan on 2.14.11 in response to this review! The problems I experienced are a known issue which the company is in the process of resolving. The problem is that if you scan too much text, the "buffer" gets full and the algorithm does not work well. This explanation precisely matches the issues I was having. The first two or three lines would always scan perfectly, but then a bunch of garbage would seep in making the rest of the scan unusable. If you only scan a few lines at a time or scan slowly, this product will work well for you, and it is much more affordable than the CPEN.I bought this scanner and found it to be a fantastic product and great value for money. I previously have owned a similar scanner which cost more than 3 times the price and called cpen and found this to be much better and easier to use.
It is now over a year since I purchased this product and due to my business and study needs use it every day. I take it every day to the office and scan documents wherever they are without the need to bring them to a scanner. I highly recommend this to anyone which needs easy or heavy scanning. Very reliable amd credible. I especially use the text to speech feature which reads out loud e ery wrd I scan. Super cool!!!This review originally appeared in the other listing for Topscan ScanMarker product.
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I've owned this device for 10 days now. I purchased it because of 1) the price and 2) the high praise it had received elsewhere on the net.
Unfortunately for me, it has worked a total of ten minutes. You heard correctly, 10 minutes, if that long.
I received the item from Amazon on Friday afternoon (7/15). I installed the software that came on the disk on Monday (7/18). From the start, the installation told me that one of the .dlls installed from the disk was not meant to work with Windows and that I should contact someone for help.
Being an enterprising person, I went to the Topscan site and downloaded the updated software and installed it. Everything seemed to install correctly. I was able to open the software application. I was able to connect the device and I thought: "This is good!"
Unfortunately, when I tried to actually scan something into a Word document, all I kept getting was a message that the device reported an error. It didn't even scan an image of what I was trying to copy!
At that point, I contacted the support people at Topscan. To their credit, someone did contact me trying to get more information to troubleshoot my problem the same day.
In the interim, I restored my system to a point before I had installed the software from the disk accompanying the scanner and had installed the new (downloaded) software and at that point, the scanner worked for a bit, until I disconnected it from the USB port. You see, I was traveling and only had 3 USB ports available. So, I made the fatal mistake of disconnecting the ScanMarker device from the USB port that it had been connected to.
A day later, I in my naivette, I plugged the device back into a USB port again expecting that it would work. Much to my chagrin, the only thing that worked was the error message telling me the device reported an error. This was early on Friday (7/22) and I reported the problem with the ScanMarker device. This timeI made sure to send the supporting information that support had requested earlier. Today is 7/25 and I have not heard from anyone at TopScan support.
Needless to say, I am sending this item back to Amazon. I am not spending $80 for a piece of useless equipment. I am going to purchase a competitor's product.
In case you are interested, this item was installed on a HP dv4 notebook with Windows 7, 64-bit OS and 4 GB of installed RAM. The drivers do not report a problem on the device manager.
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Update on review 8/1/11
It took a couple of weeks but the support people at Topscan worked on my problem and fixed it. As it turns out, the CD shipped with the product was defective and it corrupted the driver for the scanner. Deleting the installation and re-installing the updated software did not fix the problem.
Through the persistence of the person in support I worked with (yes, during the whole time I worked with a single individual. How neat is that?)they were able to get a solution for me. It entailed deleting the driver from the Device Manager and reinstalling it manually. Since then, I've had no problems with the scanner.
I give Topscan the company five stars for their top-notch support. Note that they are shipping updated CDs to all their resellers.
So why only 4 stars? Because the scanner itself still seems to have some problems with character recognition. It could be "pilot error" in my handling of it. But it is seems to be quite picky about the speed that is used and the kind of contrast that the page being scanned has as well as the type.
I use it for capturing material resulting from research to be used in papers and other written materials and would like to have 100% accuracy. Maybe that is not possible, however, I do think there is some room for improvement in the results I am getting. That is why only 4 stars.
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Update on review: 5/4/12
Well, after the fix on my old laptop, the pen worked well...until I decided to get a new laptop. I now have an Asus i7-2640M processor with 8GB of Ram and still running Windows 7 64 bit OS.
I, again thinking that this hardware would install, downloaded the newest version of the software from the Scanmaker website. Tried to install and am getting a fatal error message that there is an access violation at xxxx address in module 'DetectScanner.exe'. I've written to support again but have not heard anything.
Think I am going to take my loses and buy something else.Product is probably the best out there for the money but is not very easy to use. I wanted to order this also for my special ed kids, but this product is too hard to use.
My hands even with a highlighter is never straight. Also if I lower the speed the scanner does not recognize the words. The image feature is one line at a time so pictures are not possible or visualized well. I can not really use it for what I had anticipated.
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Scanmarker has become an indispensable tool for my research work. I check out many books from interlibrary loan and from my university, and the ability to scan in notes has been a real time saver. I highly recommend Scanmarker to my students as well, making sure that they include all the essential citation information with all scanned entries. It's been very helpful.
