After a long period of silence PoM is back again. I’m sorry, but I have been in exam the last weeks and thus I was only able to publish some posts I had already prepared on our German blog. This week’s topic: scan pens.
When I heard of scan pens a few years ago, it appeared to me like a dream: I imagined myself sitting in our library just letting my scan pen hover over the pages of a book while the others around me were still taking notes or typing on their notebooks. A year ago I bought such a pen – here are my experiences:
The products I found to choose between are the IRISPen, the C-Pen and the Wizcom Infoscan. IRISPen and C-Pen are wired, while the Infoscan is wireless (which makes it quite interesting for the library. All of them offer software to scan and import text into various programmes (like Word), some even offer functions like a dictionary or an address import. In the end I have chosen (or better: I had to choose) the IRISPen, as it is the only one that is also available for Mac OSX.
Of course, I had to correct my initial dream in some ways. Here are some of these “dream destroyers”:
- As the IRISPen is wired, it always needs a connection to the computer – which means I had to take my notebook to the library as well. When scanning, the wire is sometimes very annoying.
- Scanning with a scan pen is not as easy as it appears in the advertisements. It is a technique that needs quite an amount of pratice.
- Most manufacturers state a recognition rate of 97 %, which means that there are 3 mistakes within 100 items. The question is what is meant with “item”. If it is referring to words, then 97% is quite good, but if it’s reffering ro charakters, this would mean almost one mistake per line (taken an avarage line in Word with about 80 charakters). In case of the IRISPen the ratio is referring ro words. Nevertheless, the sucess depends on various factors: skill of the user, quality of the template, how even can the pages be made (especially in huge books), etc.
My conclusion: Although a lot of practice was needed to handle my scan pen it has paid off at last. But one has to be aware that the text scanned with such a pen will in most cases not be perfect – there will be some mistakes. You can read it without a problem, but if you want to cite it you should check it again. Thus I’m using my scan pen when first approaching a book: It is then much easier and faster to make excerpts, and they don’t have to be perfect, as I have experienced that I’m normally only citing a tiny amount of them in the end. What’s quite nice are the two buttons on the IRISPen which can be assigned to various commands like <enter> or <delete>, so you don’t have to reach for the keyboard all the time. Thus a scan pen can be both a time saver and an ease to your work.
Another tip for users of scholarz.net: You can, of course, also fill your scholarz.net sources with a scan pen.
Have you already had any experiences with scan pens? Then please comment on this post! I’m especially interested in users that have tested other models (C-Pen, Infoscan).
Tags: scan pen
