Customer Reviews

IRIS ReadIris Pro 11.0 (Mac) [Old Version]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I bought ReadIris 7 based on its price and on the claims made on the package. It was terrible. ReadIris promos and manuals claim the program gets smarter as you use it. That is undoubtedly true, but it starts out so stupid that you have a huge amount of work ahead of you just to get it functioning even close to the way it should. Frequently it expects you to go through an entire document with it and tell it which bitmaps represent which letter. This can be incredibly time consuming.

When ReadIris 11 came out, I figured that four versions later it probably does the things it says it does. It doesn't. I still had the same problem with it garbling large portions of a text image, so I wanted to see what it would do with a perfect text. I created a Word file, saved it as a PDF, and then saved the PDF as a JPEG. Since the text was perfect, ReadIris should have been able to process it perfectly. However, it still garbled about 10 percent of the text and expected me to go through the bitmaps again and tell it how to read things.

ReadIris 11 is also very crash prone if your page contains graphics. The box and the manual say it can process these things well, but today it crashed five or six times trying to process a document that contained simple black-and-white graphics. It succeeded in processing it only after I went into a photo editing program and removed the graphics from the image. This crashing is a serious problem, because I have a brand-new Macintosh G5 with 1.5 GB of RAM. If it crashes so easily on my machine, what does it do in more modest computers?

One odd but telling thing about ReadIris 11 is that the box and manual claim that it can perform certain tasks "perfectly". If a software company is so naive as not to know that, in the US market, claiming a product performs "perfectly" can lead to an expensive fraud suit, it should set off an alarm in the consumer's head.

A far better Mac OCR program, which, sadly, is not sold as a standalone, is the OS X version of FineReader that was found on the utility disks that came with Epson all-in-one printers a year or two ago. In contrast to ReadIris, this program does perform almost perfectly, but you can't buy it in a box or as a download, unfortunately.

Unlike several of the other reviewers, I've been a happy user of ReadIRIS for several years. I'm a graduate student, so there are lots of times when I need to pull text out of pdfs from older journal articles. ReadIRIS wasn't perfect, but compared to the time it would take to do the same thing by hand, it was worth it. So when a new version was announced for Leopard, I decided to get a copy.

That will be the last copy I'll buy. The software appears to work fine, but the publisher has decided to treat paying customers like criminals. When you install the software it asks you to enter a serial number. Fair enough. However after entering the serial number you have to either call the publisher (during business hours of course) or go online and register to get a 'key'. The key is linked to the the machine you install it on. But don't get too comfortable - you can't write this down in case you need to reinstall or buy a new computer. If you do either, you're going to have to get a new key. Seems like a way to force personal information out of you so that you can support their marketing department.

Given that, I'll wait until another company releases something. In the mean time, be ready to set up a new filter on your email program to get rid of their spam.

I was quite surprised to read the other negative reviews for Readiris Pro software, as I have been using Readiris for over a year without any problem. Occassionaly, I have to teach the program what a few letters are (for example, near the bottom of a page), but I have never had to do that more than 3-4 times per page. All text translated very well, and reduced my typing to less than 10% what it was before the program. Alhtough it is not the best Mac software out there, it certainly does what it advertises. And the program is easy to use.

Seriously, this is one of the worst application ever made. It crashes on Leopard. If you ever need to update or reinstall, you have to email them for a link to download the update by FTP. Then email them again to get a software key. A software key? This is in addition to the registration code that you also have to enter. It would be less frustrating to transcribe everything by hand. Purchased. Installed. Registered. Emailed. Entered key. Deleted application from my drive.

Without a doubt the single most disappointing software purchase I have made in years.

I bought this as I thought it was high time for an upgrade from my old OCR software and boy was that a mistake! Within two days I had switched back to the old software.

Not only was the recognition far from acceptable, it lacks even basic features that I consider essential such as the ability to manually define row and column positions when reading table data (a primary use for me).

Now I can see why they don't actually offer a downloadable demo, only a flash video. I can't imagine that anyone would actually pay for this piece of junk if they had tried it first.

I bought Readiris Pro 11 beacause their website was stating how powerful it was even in recognising Asian (japanese) types.
They don't have a dedicated version for Asian types for Mac users as for Windows, but it was said an add-on was available. So, I bought it and asked them for such add-on, they sent me a link to download a full Asian Mac version.
It installed easily but is useless, because Readiris shuts down each time I load an image with japanese types, and they stopped offering any help or clues. Maybe it's not compatible with Leopard, but no warning is presented regarding this issue in the program or their wesite.
I still would like to have a solution to recognise Japanese letters being offered from Readiris for Mac Leopard users...offering me their Windows Asian version would be fine!

OCR, with this program, simply does not work with our hardware. The program crashes. We have the latest version that just came in the mail. What a waste of money.

Hardware tested with this software: Powerbook 15" 1.5 GHz G4, OS X 10.4.8, 2 GB of RAM.

I bought Readiris 11.6 and installed it to use it on my Mac with Leopard. I have an Epson Perfection scanner, which works great with OmniPro and other programs on that same mac.

Well, Readiris doesn't recognize any scanner at all. Their "Support" people take over a week to reply and are rude and unhelpful. Their documentation is terrible (the English is hard to understand and in any case the documentation for version 11 was prepared for version 9 and they have not made updates).

I am getting my money back from American Express (who were very sympathetic to me for having bought a product that doesn't work and for having wasted my time with the developer's worthless "support" staff).

Don't buy this product!

I have a new Mac Pro with 4 Meg RAM and am using an HP LaserJet scanner to try to get a document into OCR using ReadIRIS Pro 11. I can do 1 page just fine, but if I ask it to do 2 or more pages, it crashes every time, losing all my work. I called their TechSupport and they said since I'm using Leopard that I need to get the latest TWAIN driver from HP, which I think I already had, but I re-downloaded the driver and re-installed anyway. Still doesn't work. Very frustrating to lose many hours of valuable time. Don't bother buying this terrible software.

I have been using Readiris Pro 11 for some time now, but on a PC. I recently just switched to MAC. So of course I had to buy the corresponding Readiris Pro 11. I was weary because of the reviews that I read on here, but to my surprise it worked just fine on my MAC. There were a little bit more kinks that I had to work out, which I didnt have to worry about on my PC, but once I got through those, everything else worked great. It read my documents with a lot of accuracy and speed which is all that I really asked for. The software gets the job done.