IRISPen Express 6 Pen Scanner

There is no driver and macbooks have no cd option but a flash drive works.We needed this to do two things.A. Copy emails from business cardsB. Copy emails from a book -small print.It failed miserably at both -90% had one error or another.

I'd like to set out a review for mac users.1. I am a law student trying to use the scanner to consolidate information from book to print. The books I use have writing in them, over the words, and lots of highlighting and underlining.2. I was extremely reticent to buy the pen because of the negative reviews.3. I am using a Macbook Pro (2010) with the pen.The bottom line is that the pen really does work when you are using it with written text. Reviews that mention otherwise (I have noticed) are mainly PC users. The pen really is helpful in getting down all of the information you want.A. Dealing with books (exclusively with typed print)The pen works wonderfully. It works BEST with a book on a flat surface. (I have only had problems with very thick book in the beginning chapters (where the binding is not flat on the table. It can read over yellow highlighting without a problem. It has a 60-70% success rate with underlined words. It obviously works best with clean text.B. Mac experienceI have a feelign that the OCR engine for the mac software is somewhat different (though I could be wrong) than the PC version. The far and few between Mac users have seem to have positive experiences.C. Realistic ExpectationsIn an ideal world, the pen would work perfectly... of course, it does not. But you can definitely optimize the experience to make it work best for you.1. Somehow it depends on the light. Insufficient lighting with not allow the text to be read. Too much lighting on the other hand, seems to overwhelm the pen and writing does not get recognized (so don't hold have your friend hold a flashlight above the book... like we did last weekend). Second, the pen can recognize text REALLY quickly. But when it's underlined or highlighted, slow down. I usually do an entire line (flat, good lighting, clean text) in a quarter of a second. And it's 99% always right. I slow down on highlighted text and that seems to work well.Lastly, I typically run into problems when I try to only get particular words from the page instead of a whole line. this might be due to my beginner level use, though.Just realize that this technology isn't perfect, but it is pretty good. For the price, it will save you thousands of keystrokes. I just hope this review presents an objective approach that might explain some of the more negative ones. If you find any questions or issues, comment and I'll try my best to address.-Rob

This product works alright, so long that one is willing to put up with plenty of grief. The IRISPen express 6 promises to scan printed text and numbers "with an accuracy of up to 100%." Technically, this is accurate, since anywhere from 1% to 99% of the time can be considered "up to 100%," but it is also misleading, given the experience of use. About 40% of the time, the scanner interprets chicken scratch from printed text, and the result is completely unreadable. Another 40% of the time, the text is readable but not accurate. One must spend a good deal of time determining what the scanner meant. ("W" often shows up as "\V" and "to" often becomes £o," spaces do not necessarily scan at all, soyourtextlookslikethis, and other similar inaccuracies.) Completely accurate text appears perhaps 15% of the time. With this in mind, the scanner handles highlighting fine, and serves as a good replacement for sticky notes and highlighting in books, and is usually faster than typing notes. Forget scanning underlined text, though. The pen shows almost no recognition for it.The percentages above totaled 95%. The other 5% of the time, the pen will freeze. Although this product advertises full compatibility with Macintosh--one of the few products to do so--there are several technical glitches that need to be worked out. When the pen freezes, it is completely unresponsive to the "force quit" feature and remains unusable until the computer is restarted. Do not bother trying to do the safe restart. The pen blocks anything short of flipping the switch. I have sought technical support on this issue, but have yet to receive a response.

I had really high hopes for this IRISPen Express 6 Pen Scanner that were instantly destroyed upon my first use. I wanted to use it while I read to take notes and scan important sections from my readings into my notes. As a graduate student, much of my time is spent reading and note taking so I felt that this would be a time saver. Unfortunately, it was not. I tried it about a dozen times and each time I was disappointed. It actually took me much longer to use this IRISPen than it did to simply type out the sections. In order for it to work as advertised, i think that you need to practice considerably at holding it at the right angle. Make sure to read the instructions before you start, otherwise it will be frustrating. Also, this is best used on crisp white paper with a solid black ink on a completely flat surface. If you are trying to scan sentences from a book, especially one that has a tight binding and somewhat worn pages, you are going to get a lot of wrong characters and repeated letters. I would not recommend this for people wanting to highlight sections of books into your notes. It takes too much time and has too many mistakes to the point that you waste time correcting the mistakes instead of reading and taking notes.