Customer Reviews

C Pen 600 Handheld Scanner

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If you are expecting this pen to make your life as a student a whole lot easier....don't count on it. This technology has a very long way to go. I asked for the c-pen 600 for my birthday. I was expecting it to help me with writing my college-level research papers by providing an easy way for me to import and edit text into my word documents. Little did I know, my 2 year-old nephew can read better than this pen. I had trouble getting it to read the text in its own instruction booklet, and as far as photocopied pages (such as journal articles and other research materials), forget it!

Here is an example of the mistakes that this pen makes:

The c-pen is a very useful tool.

Gets translated to:

Fhe c-pen is @ veyr useful tolo.

Pros:

1. Good idea.

2. Works well if you don't actually need to use the info that you collect with the pen.

3. Easy to use.

Cons:

1. Doesn't work well at all.

2. Expensive price.

3. Using the c-write function, it takes you 5 minutes to write your name.

I hope that this review has been helpful. I wrote it because the average rating on this product is WAY too high. I just don't want anyone else to get duped like I did.

-Jake

This is a great device for school or office. It is suprisingly accurate and a abundunt amount of memory, but it has its flaws. For one it is not compleatly accurate. Sometimes even with perfect text quality it misinterprets what it scans. Also it gets hard to work on curved surfaces such as an open book. All in all this is a good product once you get a hang of it.

This has to be the best handheld pen scanner I've ever used. It is much more comfortable to use compared to the Quicklink. A bit costly but worth ever cent.

Ideal for students who highlight and rewrite lecture notes.

A great concept---and it really does a good job of scanning various size text pretty accurately. Nice size; feels comfortable in the hand; a few of the commands to modify text have an awkward pattern or series to them. It could be very good. PROBLEMS: 1) it shipped without the CD for the software. 2) After downloading the software, I came to realize that it is not compatible with Win ME. I have to scan text, and upload to a PC that runs Win 98 and then transfer the text to my PC. No where on the web site or in the printed material does it state this. In fact, technical support does not even OPENLY acknowledge this. 3) Since the company is in Sweden, one must relay on email----the first response took a day or so. Not bad. The second response took 3 weeks. I am still awaiting a response to the 3rd "fix"that tech support has suggested---4 weeks later.

Initially I was stunned by this technology. I scanned text from books, the newspaper, nutrition information off a candy bar wrapper... all with reasonably good results. Once I started to use if for serious work, I was substantially less impressed. I had planned to collect specific data fields from a printed directory; instead of using a sheet-feed flat-bed scanner followed by heavy cut&paste, I thought I could just selectively hand-scan the needed data fields. While the OCR accuracy might be acceptable for short passages, the error frequency becomes unacceptable when more text is collected. The frequency of errors was so great that I went back to the flat-bed and cut&paste. I like the ergonomics of the unit. I am trying to figure out what I can still do this device.

When I decided to cough up the $150 dollars, I expected to be amazed by it's power. I was definately wrong. The only thing I found it useful for, was containing addresses and amusing myself. If you are considering purchasing this product, I would suggest you buy it from an Amazon user for a cheaper price.

I like this gadget, although it's far from perfected yet. I use it mainly to look up words in foreign books as I go along. For that purpose it usually works great and saves me a huge amount of time leafing through paper dictionaries or poking at the keyboards of electronic pocket dictionaries. (Note that the C Pen only looks up words in dictionaries. It cannot "translate", as the promos claim it can.) It takes a little time to get skilled at scanning text, and in a recent book I was reading it couldn't recognize the frequent German letter combination "sch" in a relatively normal typeface. Usually, however, it presents no serious difficulties.
For scanning large amounts of text, I don't think it's very convenient, because it's just too slow and not very accurate. You can, however, transfer the text to your computer and run a spellcheck on it in Word or some other program. That helps a bit. One nice thing is that it's smart enough to know that when it hits a hypen at the end of a line it probably needs to join the divided word.
It's sad that C Pens are so hard to get. It has the potential for great popularity, but in my experience Swedish companies let their popular items just get rare, rather than meeting market demand.

I used to had to manually copy excerpts and text from books while doing reasearxh, one day I saw this kid at the library come in, pulled a stacjk of bboks and started driving this small pen accross it... I asked him whart that was he showed me the C pen 600 scanner and how it worked, ten minutes later he left and I was still on my first book!

Now I have a life again! Could not live without this little device; I wonder why doesn't everyone else that does reasearch use one. What a time saver and no mistakes is the best!

I purchased the CPen 200 and regret it. Accuracy is not good enough for most purposes I have tried to use it for and I have found it much quicker to type out text manually, or even write it out by hand, than to try and scan it in and correct the errors made by the CPen. The XTNDAccess infrared connection which I needed to purchase with the device is extremely temperamental on Windows 2000, and impossible to install on Windows NT Workstation - the tech support people were downright unhelpful and refused to direct enquiries to customer services. The battery life on the device is poor and I found I had run down the batteries in only a few hours of use. If I could return the device I would; buying it was throwing money down the drain.

I received my c-pen 600c this morning and, within only an hour or so, it was up and running. A couple of trial goes with the pen and you are soon scanning like a pro.

DON'T WORRY IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS XP - some of the previous reviewers of the 600c and 800 have complained about compatibility with windows XP but I had no problems. You go to the c-pen website and just download the update - easy!

My 'first-timer' advice - do a trial scan with the pen and remember you have to 'exit' and it will then give you the option to 'save'. Save it (file name 'test' or whatever). Then go online and download the update. The 'my c-pen' icon will show on your desktop. Connect your pen to the computer via cable of IFR and make sure the pen is ON. ONLY then, go into 'my c-pen' and the 'test' file should show.

DON'T WORRY IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS - I sent an email to the c-pen support team (just about the possibility of getting a USB cable instead of the COM port cable - one feature of the c-pen that isn't so good) and had an answer within a couple of hours.

ACCURACY - it is hit and miss which you sort of expect with this kind of gadget. Sometimes it is brilliant and other times it just can't get it! Be vigilant - check the screen reads correctly before doing the next line - and you'll be fine. It's really easy to delete the last line scanned and try again. A flat surface seems to be a must.

IS IT WORTH IT? - I got a pretty good deal on my pen - I wouldn't really have liked to spend over £100 for this. However, it is an investment if you spend a lot of time typing out text (I'm a postgraduate student doing research and I know this is going to be an invaluable tool). I am also impressed with the amount of text memory (1500 pages) - great for long days in the library.

In closing, I would like to urge you not to be scared off by the previous reviews - in my experience it isn't so bad at all!