WizCom WSP1000P SuperPen Professional

I purchased the pen to scan numbers only. That should be simple enough. NOT! The accuracy rate for the pen was about 20%. I could have made better hand written notes drunk. In fact, if the pen acts like a drunk. Not only cannot not copy numbers, just simple numbers, the software staggers like a bar fly constantly missing the stool, but foolish enough not to know it. So my pen, after a generous probationary period and attempts to rehabilitate is being returned to send never to come back to this house again under any circumstance. It is a very bad pen! I truly lost my patience trying to make this work. The designers need to go back to the drawing board sober this time.

Okay, I know it sounds dumb and obvious, but if you can't get the pen to communicate with your PC, make sure to push the cable jack is pushed in completely. I have a film background and am used to using a variety of cables and electronic devices, so when I read the advice in the help section of the desktop program about checking the jack and the batteries I thought yeah, yeah I'm not an idiot. So, I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver and desktop program twice from the disk and once from the wizcomtech.com downloadable files. I was convinced the program wasn't installed properly (especially because of the little white and blue icon in the top left of the title bar which usually shows up when a program is not responding). Finally I looked at the help file again and tried pushing the jack in more. It went "click" and all was well from there. Believe me, even if you're conviced the jack is in all the way, push it in harder until you hear a distinct "click."

Also, to reiterate what others have said, the innacurate text recognition is almost always due to scanning too fast or not holding the pen at the appropriate angle. When I get a line that scans poorly, if I scan it a second time and focus more on going slowly and holding the pen correctly nine times out of ten it comes out much better. I found especially that the ends of lines scanned badly because (without realizing it)as I crossed the page I would tilt the pen instead of moving my hand.

This product isn't perfect and will make some errors no matter what you do, but it is far better and more useful than I had hoped. It is better than other text recognition software I've used and so convenient for taking notes for graduate school from library books I can't write in. I also use a lot of primary documents from the early modern period and earlier and the pen can actually occasionally read some of that text as well. I didn't really intend to use it for that type of work anyway and I wouldn't recommend it for text pre 19th/18th century or so, but it's nice to know it may be possible in some instances. It also sometimes has trouble reading modern typefaces that are in italics or a bit large. It's a bit hit or miss if you go outside standard typefaces, but for most body text of books and magazines it's great.

Even after the supposed training of the pen, out of 20 scans it did not completely recognize the text once. It is very position sensitive and the technology needs to be significantly improved.

I am using the to take notes for my various on-line and research projects. While the results are about 90% correct, I can usually fill in the blanks, and it is much much better than hand written notes. I would recommend this product to any student or researcher that does not need to take entire pages of verbatim notes. For what I am using it for it is well worth the money.

This product is almost impossible to configure with your PC unless you have a PhD in computer science. NOTHING works out of the box...I've tried to follow some of the suggestions that other reviewers have posted with no result. There is little if any documentation that comes with the pen and I'm not sure that I'm getting great reliability with the scanning device itself presuming if I can ever figure out how to upload the scanned information into Word.

I rarely resort to using all caps in any message I write BUT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE BUY THIS PRODUCT! The posted technical advice from users should have been the warning to me not to buy this and the negative reviews are accurate. This product just doesn't seem to work well and in 2008 if an intelligent but not professional computer user cannot get an electronic product to work out-of-the-box, or close to it, then the device is very badly designed...and this device IS very badly designed.