Customer Reviews

Readiris 12 Home for Pc Single Full

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

 

 

I purchased ReadIris 12 Home Edition three days ago from Amazon and have tried all of its features. It is easy to use and fast at scanning pages. You can set the program to scan to many different programs and formats including MS Word, Excel, Openoffice, and Corel Wordperfect Office, and it can scan in formats such as doc, odt, rtf, and PDF. The best results to OCR text appear to be to the PDF and ODT formats. The best results for OCR are on clear text without a lot of complex fonts, but the program has a learn feature improve OCR results. The Pro and Corporate editions have some extra features, but for home users the Home Edition is a powerful program that is easy to use, scans quickly, and is a great bargain.

I purchased this software to convert a book that my son had written on a typewriter. I scanned over 500 hundred pages front and back and only had one scan error. The product performed as advertised and loaded easily first time. Would recommend to anyone that has a need.

I bought this at Amazon.com while at my place in Florida. I tried linking it to my old Canon1250 scanner but couldn't find a suitable driver within ReadIris. So I scan documents using other software and read the picture files with ReadIris. Here at my home in Canada I have a newer Canon5600 sanner and ReadIris didn't have the right driver for it either. However, I set it up using a general Twain driver and the scanner works OK within ReadIris. I find that Readris reads text well if that text is easily read by eye. However, I used it to read an old typewritten document that had been photocopied may times and was a bit difficult to read by eye; ReadIris misread many words in that document. I have it set up to save any document it reads in a WORD file. It does this quite well, although it blocks text and puts the blocks in a WORD table. It takes a bit of work to lay out the scanned text in normal paragraph format, especially if there are a lot of bullets or sub-points and you're fussy about formatting.

This is the most cumbersome piece of software ever, it creates far more work than it saves. 1) For every minute you spend having this program scan and recognize your document, you will spend 10 minutes reformatting or correcting the word documment it created. 2) it does not recognize slash marks, such as URL's or dates, "07/24/11." It turns anything with a slash into an italic, which means going back through the whole document and fixing anything with a slash. 3)the default recognition process involves separating every paragraph, or any non-adjacent text, into a separately formatted section - if you want the whole page formatted as it is, you have to go through additional steps to make sure that happens correctly. 4)(and most infuriating)your finished document cannot be seemlessly merged into an existing Word document - it is created in a box that is then inserted into a Word document like a graphic. This means you can't cut and paste anything from the box, the box travels as a unit, and must be formatted so that it falls in the same layer as the existing text - otherwise as you make changes to your document, you will find this text box superimposed on your existing text. More steps. 5) Inserting page breaks into your scanned document? Good luck - you may find the page you were working on has moved to the end of the document, or been layerd on another page, or disappeared entirely.
Tech support is non-existent; search the website for a button that says "contact us," finally find it and the only option is to send them an email, which they of course ignore.
I recently used the (free) OCR software on my printer/scanner/fax (I won't mention the name because this is not a plug for that product) and it is like heaven compared to this piece of junk - much simpler, faster and more accurate.

Credit the Iris team for responding to troubleshooting, but I couldn't find any satisfactory service with this software,e.g.,scans would not even properly copy text: right side of page address/comments melted in with address/comment on left side of page; 2 and 3 bullet line became one long line. It just took longer to adjust text scanned than to have retyped the documents; and graphics scans were indifferent. I removed the prgram and returned to using my 3-year old Epson scanner software.

As a tax accountant, my primary need for Readiris12 is scanning. It was very easy to install and use. I have two scanners. Setup for each scanner was easy, as is switching from one to the other. Speed and accuracy is the most important thing for me and this program delivers. I have paid twice as much for more advance OCR programs but this inexpensive program does the job.

The best ocr software I ever used, easy to use, very fast, works well on windows 7, scanning to excel,word, or pdf.
forget buying those high priced machines if you have a scanner and this software your set readiris 12 is all you need.

I had about 50 typed pages in PDF that I needed to convert to a Word document that I could edit. This did the job about 90%. I'm still having to do some cleanup work but much of the conversion is just fine. It isn't painless but much better than retyping.

There is no Iris online support for the Home version of Read Iris 12. The only support offered is for the Professional or Corporate versions which start at $115. I would have thought twice about buying this if I had known there was no technical support. However, I did post questions online and found a reviewer who helped me set this program up. It works well now that this nice gentleman instructed me on how to use it.

IRIS OCR software seems to work okay BUT if you encounter any problems they are NOT there for you. Their phones are not manned. All you get is a recording telling you to go to their Web site and fill out a form. So far I have filled out this form four times over the past week and a half, asking for simple help with the same problem. Every time the form appears to submit properly and I am advised that I will receive an email acknowledgement. Never happened. No acknowledgement, no response, no help and no way to contact this company by telephone and no, the responses are NOT going in my Junk File. They are simply not responding to a legitimate request for assistance. Go to [...] for a seemingly unbiased review of the top ten OCR programs and choose something else. You may be one of the lucky ones that have no problems but if you do, do not expect any Tech help from IRIS. You will be on your own based on my experience. I currently have a BBB complaint filed against them. Will see what that brings.

Followup Report: I finally received the necessary activation key and now find that the product fails to recognize my Canon Canoscan 9000F flat bed scanner. OCR is not much good without it being able to scan a document! I have exchanged several emails with ReadIRIS all asking me to do the same things and supply the same information over and over again. I have responded to each but still do not have an operable OCR application. Out of desperation I purchased a competing OCR application that has great ratings and it is now running flawlessly. ReadIRIS will be removed from my PC. Do not waste your money on ReadIRIS products, go with applications that have good ratings of 4 stars or better. They may cost a bit more, but are worth it in the long run.

Second followup: It looks like ReadIRIS does actually read reviews on their products. I received a phone call from their Tech Support this AM and were finally able to get the program to run under Windows x64 using a Canon CanoScan 9000F. Had to do with permissions that the other programs I was running were not concerned about. Had to run ReadIRIS the first time as admisistrator to get it to recognize the twain driver. It only took three weeks!