Imagine having the capabilities of a bulky flatbed scanner in a device that slips into your pocket! If you sit at a desk all day long this may not be important to you. But if you're a mobile professional who occasionally needs to capture printed text from a page wherever you are, this pocket scanner might be very important. You might be a student needing to copy a paragraph or two for a report, or a businessperson wanting to make a quick copy of a sales agreement. You might even be sitting on the beach reading a book of poetry and find a few lines you want to copy and send to a friend. Whatever you might be doing, you can now scan text with the help of the QuickLink Pen.
The QuickLink Pen by WizCom Technologies (www.wizcomtech.com) is a small, hand-held, fully self-contained text scanner. It's an ergonomically designed device about the size of a large marker pen, that weighs a mere three
ounces including batteries! The scanner at the tip of the Pen is angled to
insure proper scanning. Seven small buttons just below the display let you
access the Pen's functions. The scanned text is displayed on a 3-line green LCD display in easy-to-read black text. The QuickLink Pen can turn the text upside down, making it easy for left-handed users to operate the device. The Pen scans left-to-right or right-to-left, and its tip has a guiding line and rollers to make text scanning a snap! However, a steady hand and good hand/eye coordination are still required for the best results (see Screen 1).
Screen 1: QuickLink scanning text from Pocket PC
magazine.
Built-in character recognition
The QuickLink Pen has a built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capability that turns the scanned characters into electronic text. It can recognize 6 to 22 point text, at a rate of 50-90 characters per second (based on the style of text and user's scanning ability.) The Pen scans
one line at a time and you have to stop at the end of each line for a second or two to let the pen finish "reading" the text. When the Pen is ready, just lift the Pen up, move it to the next line, and keep on scanning. Continue this process until you have captured all the text you desire. The Pen "assumes" that the text you are scanning belongs in a single paragraph, unless you press the down arrow button to insert a return. While the Pen's OCR program is very accurate with printed text, it will not recognize handwritten text. (A future version of QuickLink Pen will be capable of scanning handwriting as a picture file, and capturing it as a graphic file, according to WizCom.) It also has difficulty dealing with text on a low-contrast background. It will read bold, italicized, inverted, and underlined words, but outputs them as normal, unformatted text.
The Pen includes an extensive dictionary and a built-in text-editing feature. Four megabytes of memory gives the Pen the capability of storing 1000 pages of text internally. An additional 4 Mb of Flash memory can be
added to the Pen, allowing its operating system, OCR software and dictionary to be upgraded in the future. The barcode symbols for numbers, punctuation, and every character in the English alphabet are printed on the back of the Pen's hard plastic carrying case. If you run across text that can't be read, you can scan the barcode symbols on the case to input the text manually. You can also use this card to edit text errors.
Transferring text from the Pen to a desktop or Pocket PC
The QuickLink Desktop application lets you exchange data between the QuickLink Pen and your desktop PC. Using this software, you can also attach the Pen to your desktop PC and use it to scan in data directly. The
QuickLink Pen has four built-in applications: Notes, Address Book, Internet Links, and Table & Charts. (An application supporting graphics imaging will be included in a future release.)
Notes: Use this to capture text from books, magazines, newspapers, and transfer it directly to your word processor, notepad, or text editor.
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