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Scanners. Scan a line at a time

 

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The Data Pen, from I.R.I.S. America, is a hand–held scanner that looks a highlighter. This scanner accurately transfers text from the printed page directly into any Windows application. Unlike most scanners the Data Pen takes in text one line at a time.

The Data Pen works best on flat surfaces, with printed or typed text. The user must be sure the brightness switch on the Data Pen is set to the correct option: bold text, normal text or light text. If the switch is improperly set, accuracy will suffer and scanning speed will be below the claimed 100 characters per second.

The Data Pen’s optical character recognition is highly accurate. It’s perfect for small jobs, such as scanning a few lines of text from an invoice or for students who need to put notes into a laptop. One of the most interesting potential uses is scanning a business card, which the Data Pen did with few errors, missing only a capital letter and a space between numbers in the ZIP code.

The most difficult aspect is Data Pen’s confusing manual. The Data Pen requires a bi-directional parallel port, which was not pointed out anywhere in the materials. The scanner software must be reconfigured to enable – printing a potential source of confusion.