Customer Reviews

Topscan Scanner Reading Pen, Handheld Pen Scanner Text Scanner and Text Reader, Scan Text Directly to the Computer with Extra Features (Text to Speech, Free Languages, Dictionary and More) Great Gift

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

 

 

I bought this scanner to replace a spare Ectaco C-Pen 20 Handheld Scanner that had hit the floor one too many times. The scanmarker is much cheaper - less well built, and the actual OCR (Optical Character Recognition) function is pitiful in comparison to the CPen. The one function which does make great sense and works well is the text to speech - which allows you to scan chunks of text and to hear whether the text has made it in OK. Unfortunately, the OCR itself is so bad that any time saved by the text to speech function is lost due to the extensive corrections which must be made to the scanned text for it to be readable.

AMAZING UPDATE: I was contacted by the founder of Topscan on 2.14.11 in response to this review! The problems I experienced are a known issue which the company is in the process of resolving. The problem is that if you scan too much text, the "buffer" gets full and the algorithm does not work well. This explanation precisely matches the issues I was having. The first two or three lines would always scan perfectly, but then a bunch of garbage would seep in making the rest of the scan unusable. If you only scan a few lines at a time or scan slowly, this product will work well for you, and it is much more affordable than the CPEN.

I use this scanner for study.It is easy to install and took me just a few minutes of practicing to figure out how to work with it. And I am amazed how accurate it can scan! I scan important information from my books and then edit my own notes on the computer, which really helps increasing the book re-sale value since I don't have to highlight on book anymore!

Oh, if you have issue scanning straight lines,I found using a ruler below the tip of the scanner for supporting can give you a perfect straight line!

Product is probably the best out there for the money but is not very easy to use. I wanted to order this also for my special ed kids, but this product is too hard to use.
My hands even with a highlighter is never straight. Also if I lower the speed the scanner does not recognize the words. The image feature is one line at a time so pictures are not possible or visualized well. I can not really use it for what I had anticipated.

This review originally appeared in the other listing for Topscan ScanMarker product.
************************************************************************************
I've owned this device for 10 days now. I purchased it because of 1) the price and 2) the high praise it had received elsewhere on the net.
Unfortunately for me, it has worked a total of ten minutes. You heard correctly, 10 minutes, if that long.
I received the item from Amazon on Friday afternoon (7/15). I installed the software that came on the disk on Monday (7/18). From the start, the installation told me that one of the .dlls installed from the disk was not meant to work with Windows and that I should contact someone for help.
Being an enterprising person, I went to the Topscan site and downloaded the updated software and installed it. Everything seemed to install correctly. I was able to open the software application. I was able to connect the device and I thought: "This is good!"
Unfortunately, when I tried to actually scan something into a Word document, all I kept getting was a message that the device reported an error. It didn't even scan an image of what I was trying to copy!
At that point, I contacted the support people at Topscan. To their credit, someone did contact me trying to get more information to troubleshoot my problem the same day.
In the interim, I restored my system to a point before I had installed the software from the disk accompanying the scanner and had installed the new (downloaded) software and at that point, the scanner worked for a bit, until I disconnected it from the USB port. You see, I was traveling and only had 3 USB ports available. So, I made the fatal mistake of disconnecting the ScanMarker device from the USB port that it had been connected to.
A day later, I in my naivette, I plugged the device back into a USB port again expecting that it would work. Much to my chagrin, the only thing that worked was the error message telling me the device reported an error. This was early on Friday (7/22) and I reported the problem with the ScanMarker device. This timeI made sure to send the supporting information that support had requested earlier. Today is 7/25 and I have not heard from anyone at TopScan support.
Needless to say, I am sending this item back to Amazon. I am not spending $80 for a piece of useless equipment. I am going to purchase a competitor's product.
In case you are interested, this item was installed on a HP dv4 notebook with Windows 7, 64-bit OS and 4 GB of installed RAM. The drivers do not report a problem on the device manager.
************************************************************************************************
Update on review 8/1/11
It took a couple of weeks butthe support people at Topscan worked on my problem and fixed it. As it turns out, the CD shipped with the product was defective and it corrupted the driver for the scanner. Deleting the installation and re-installing the updated software did not fix the problem.
Through the persistence of the person in support I worked with (yes, during the whole time I worked with a single individual. How neat is that?)they were able to get a solution for me. It entailed deleting the driver from the Device Manager and reinstalling it manually. Since then, I've had no problems with the scanner.
I give Topscan the company five stars for their top-notch support. Note that they are shipping updated CDs to all their resellers.
So why only 4 stars? Because the scanner itself still seems to have some problems with character recognition. It could be "pilot error" in my handling of it. But it is seems to be quite picky about the speed that is used and the kind of contrast that the page being scanned has as well as the type.
I use it for capturing material resulting from research to be used in papers and other written materials and would like to have 100% accuracy. Maybe that is not possible, however, I do think there is some room for improvement in the results I am getting. That is why only 4 stars.

I bought this scanner and found it to be a fantastic product and great value for money. I previously have owned a similar scanner which cost more than 3 times the price and called cpen and found this to be much better and easier to use.
It is now over a year since I purchased this product and due to my business and study needs use it every day. I take it every day to the office and scan documents wherever they are without the need to bring them to a scanner. I highly recommend this to anyone which needs easy or heavy scanning. Very reliable amd credible. I especially use the text to speech feature which reads out loud e ery wrd I scan. Super cool!!!

I've had this product for a few months now and I'm really surprised at how useful it's turned out to be!

I'm a lawyer so I frequently need to copy extracts from printed sources into documents. This scanner does a decent job of recognizing text -- even small print. It converts what you've scanned into text in whatever application you're running. Think of it as equivalent to a keyboard.

The only negatives:

- Mine came with the software on a CD. With CD drives becoming rare, I was lucky my work computer is old enough to still have one! But maybe you can download the drivers from the company.

- It falters a little with highlighted text or strange fonts. I haven't tried other similar products though, so I don't know how this one compares.

- It's too bad it's not wireless -- it would be great to take it somewhere without a computer. But I guess that's what you get for a good price! :)