Customer Reviews

Wizcom QuickLink SuperPen

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

 

 

The product description glosses over the problems you may encounter trying to connect this thing to your PC. It only supports a male 9-pin serial port. If you do not have one, you need to buy an adapter. Even then, you may be unpleasantly surprised. I bought a 9- to 25-pin serial adapter at Radio Shack only to burn an hour trying to set it up, and finally found, deep on the company web site, an explanation that it would only support a male 25- adapter. Now I have ordered a $20 +$5 shipping USB adapter off the Wizcom website. (Don't be fooled by the "optional USB" nonsense in the product description. It is optional in the sense that you can buy the $20 adapter later, after wasting half a day wading through the poorly documented material.) I feel that this company has been deliberately vague about the issues a customer is likely to encounter in setting this thing up. Oh, and I forgot to mention the UI's on both the pen and the desktop are wack.

This pen is an absolute waste of money. It just does not work. I was trying to scan in some addresses and phone numbers but what scanned in was nothing but rubbish. For example, I scanned in a phone number which was 956-7535, but what the pen picked up was 9:5&T585. IT DOES NOT WORK. The OCR technology is not there. Don't buy this. You won't be able to get your money back. They'll just do an exchange for another pen that does not work.

This pen was a gift and if I had bought it, I would try to get a refund especially after discovering that it costs so much! it is useless. First of all, scanning is tedious and slow.This would probably work fine for scanning inventory numbers etc. But for text paragraphs, too much trouble.I am a computer systems analyst and this thing was a pain in the neck to get working.

I purchased this product because I read and pull citations from many scientific articles and texts and put them in a bibliographic citation database.
The WizCom SuperPen definitely has a learning curve, but I found it to be short. I estimate that I'm getting approximately 98% accuracy now scanning articles with very unusual word content (paleoclimatology). This rivals the accuracy when I type these same references and is much quicker.
The SuperPen makes some demands on the user.
1. The pen must be held at a fairly steep angle to the page; 80 to 90 degrees seems to work best.
2. Accuracy seems to increase if you switch to left-handed mode so that the scanner head is looking into the upcoming text
3. A constant speed seems to work best, but there is little difference between given speeds.
4. The user must develop a consistent method of moving the scanner parallel to the lines of text. The largest error rate occurs when the scanner head is skewed or the path of the device is at an angle to the line of text.
I did discover one little idosyncracy. When the system is powered on, it tries to open the last file which you were editing. If that file is very large, the pen times out before the file is loaded. That behavior can be by-passed by holding down the Escape button as the power is turned on, thereby activating the main menu. At that point, go to the option which permits a longer time-out period and set it to some higher number. That is the only real problem which I have had so far.

I actually bought this as a gift for my wife, but have seen it in action now and am amazed (she loves it, too). The OCR picks up all but the most subtle characters, and the user interface is really smooth.

The PC software for import from/export to the pen is straight-forward and works well (even with the supplied serial adapter).

In overall value, I rate this an excellent product.

I bought the pen because I wanted to capture references and quotations from books and articles.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get the pen to communicate with the PC. The tech support person (who claimed to be the only one in Canada and North America) was reluctantly helpful. He helped me figure out the basic settings on the baud rate and the COM ports. But could not help in figuring out why the PC is not connecting to the pen. His suggestion was to re-install Windows!

The conflict of new hardware with the the COM ports is a common occurrence. If this is the case, I'm not sure why Wizcom has not created an online helpfile. If you happen to get an error message and do not know out how to resolve (hardware) conflicts on your COM port, this pen will be worthless.

The scanning is also difficult and requires practice.

I am disappointed that the pen didn't work for me.

Once receiving my pen, I spent at least 1 hour getting acquainted with it, the manual and its functions. I highly suggest spending at least some time with it so that you are comfortable with it before putting it to actual use. For me, I found that scanning from right to left was best and just got a kind of familiarity with the device. I found the pen to have over the 95% accuracy suggested by Wizcom after I had spent a little time with it.

However, it did not connect to my computer. I contacted tech support and found that he was extremely quick to respond, even after 6pm. I was very impressed. I had a few problems to be sorted out, but the most frustrating one was that I had not clicked on "turn the pen communications on." He never thought of it, and I happened to stumble across it. So if you have issues, check that every time you start the software. Now, everything works wonderfully.

In addition, I bought this pen because I have a significant learning disability and it takes me a very long time to both read and take notes. I find that this pen truly speeds up the process and makes my life a lot easier.

Despite following the step by step procedure to download the dictionary from my pc, a message "cannot establish connection" is always prompted in the pen. I read from one review that a cable adaptor was required which they purchased seperately. Could this be the same problem I am facing? If so, why did they not mention it anywhere in the book or in their ads? I would greately appreciate some help or advice here.

I bought this pen to be used as a dictionary (it can translate from English to any language in principle). The pen works; I haven't got any technical problems. Its OCR is not bad.

However, the price is way too much (I paid $150). Perhaps, most important of all, I didn't find the pen very appropriate for use as a dictionary. For example, while reading a book, for every new word (which usually doesn't come frequently) the pen needs to be turned on (takes 3-4 seconds), and then the word needs to be scanned (this you have to do slowly and carefully, and several times in case the OCR doesn't work). Overall, I found out that scanning significantly slows down reading. Perhaps, superpen is faster than looking up words in a dictionary, but not much faster.

I didn't like its dictionary software much either (not all dictionaries are of same quality!); I tried english-english and english-turkish dictionaries.

Recently, I saw an electronic dictionary (the ones with a small keyboard on it) for $45. Probably, that would have been a better choice than superpen if you only need a portable dictionary.

I first found out about it in an in-flight magazine. When I found out that scanning and dictionary facility are combined in Superpen, I decided to go for it. I have been able to save stock recommendations, useful websites that I come across in newspapers and look up for dictionary meanings. However, sometimes using it is frustrating as it does not pick up words no matter what. But I always wanted to have a dictionary handy and picking it up and looking for the word was always a pain. On that front, its a big success.
When it works, its very good.