Ectaco C-Pen Handheld Scanner

This pen has saved me hours, possibly days, of writing and typing, and probably scores of hand cramps as well. It works exceptionally well; almost entirely accurate with just a little bit of practice. True, you have to be tethered to a computer, but for the benefits of the C-PEN, I don't mind taking my laptop to the library with me or sitting next to my desktop if I'm reading at home. It does have accuracy issues with passages that have already been underlined in pen or pencil (which unfortunately, a lot of people tend to do even with library books), but has absolutely no trouble so far with highlighted text. It makes it easy for me to record notes or quotes from books for review later, as I can avoid having to transcribe it by hand it or type it from the get go.

Lots of other reviews get into the details, so I won't bother. Let me just give my opinion of how I like the performance of this pen.

I do a fair amount of scanning and use this pen for spot scanning. It is even good enough that I have found myself using this pen to scan multiple pages, although that's not what it is best at.

The only challenge I have is when I'm trying to scan near the spine of a book. When the surface is not flat, the scan can go off into left field. When that happens, I simply go back - highlight the garbage - and rescan a bit slower and it seems to pick it up fine.

Some have said it is not that fast. I find it almost as fast as I can scan a line. I don't know what they expect from a pen scanner, but all in all this picks up very well, is extremely accurate, and is fast.

Someone else complained about having to carry the driver disk around with them. I don't have any problem with this either and use the pen on both a desktop and a laptop.

Keep the pen angle about right and you can scan up a storm.

I give it about 95% + accuracy (closer to 99% without spine pages.)

Useful and genererally works BUT the DC needs to be loaded each time the pen is used making it impossible to use on a laptop unless you carry the CD with you.

I gotta admit it does make some mistakes, but it is a lot easier to use this product than to have to write evrything out.

I'm a psychologist and consult frequently on criminal forensic cases. That means I spend a lot of time reviewing mental health & legal records. The C-Pen is a Godsend for capturing the essential information in those documents. It's incredibly accurate, very fast, convenient, easy to use, and selective. You don't have to scan the whole page, and you can scan from bound or stapled documents without disassembling them. The automatic OCR conversion lets you scan directly into your word-processor or into a specialized note-taking program like WordPerfect Lightning.

As of this writing, there is a beta version of the C-Pen software for the Mac, which you can download from their site. I haven't tried the Mac version, so can't tell you about that.