The pen is mightier than the scanner

Phil Schnyder sometimes gets a baffled look from other passengers when he unpacks a device that looks like a cross between an ice cream bar and a chalkboard eraser from his carry-on.

When he starts pointing it at newspapers, magazines and business cards, he says, “I really feel like I have to explain myself.”

Schnyder, the president of a Perry, Fla., software developer, is using a hand-held scanner called an I.R.I.S.pen. About the size of a cellular phone, it reads printed text, recognizes it and feeds it to the word processing or accounting program you’re using.

“I like it because it’s portable,” says Schnyder. “When I see statistics in a magazine, I like to scan them in. I find it really useful, since I’m not the most gifted typist.”

Neither am I. Which made the offer by Image Recognition Integrated Systems of Boca Raton, Fla. to send over a sample scanner pretty irresistible.

Like every other male computer user, genetics often prevents me from reading the instructions that come with a new product. The pen proved to be no exception: I instinctively disregarded the information booklet and tried to figure out which wire went where. I was genuinely surprised when, after two or three tries (in some circles, they call this process “plug and pray”) the pen whirred to life.

Then my computer froze.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just boot ‘er up again and see what happens. After clicking on the installed software, however, I found myself staring at a lot of options that didn’t make any sense to me, like “Code 39 Extended” and “Interleaved 2 of 5″.

Time to read the directions? Nah.

Half an hour later, following a couple of trial-end-error maneuvers – and at least one more freeze – I figured it out. And this is the beauty of the I.R.I.S.pen: you just open the document you want to scan text into, and it inputs the data directly. No messy cut-and-paste.

Shortly after that, without so much as consulting the manual, I also discovered how to make my computer “speak” what I was scanning. It was pretty nifty.

The specs claim that the pen can enter up to 100 characters per second, which is considerably faster than the best typist. But I’m somewhat dubious of that number. The faster you roll the pen across a book or paper, the more wobbly your hand tends to get. What the computer should translate as a “T” becomes a “-” or a blank space. So, while I’m sure it’s possible, it’s not probably that you’ll be able to input War and Peace on your lunch break with time to spare for a trip to the water cooler.

However, for bits and pieces of text, the pen is ideal. I ran the hand-held scanner across the table, phone, printer and even a candywrapper and got excellent character recognition. It’s important to note that this method of scanning isn’t perfect, though – even when the text is printed on a laser writer or by a professional press. I ended up having to go back and correct sections of the scanned text, most of it near the end of a sentence.

Does the I.R.I.S.pen pass my test?

Pretty much. I’ve got three main criteria for evaluating these kinds of products: ease of use, overall usefulness and price.

Any son-of-a-luddite (and I include myself first and foremost in this category) can figure this contraption out, although I’m concerned about the constant freezes that interrupted my testing. I would definitely save all of your work frequently and not run too many applications while scanning with the pen.

On the question of use, I admit that I’m reaching for the pen more and more these days. Whether it’s a line of text in a newspaper article or an insightful quote I read in a book, I know it’s just a wave of the pen away from digitization. Solid typists, though, will probably find this more of a toy. For them, the only redeeming quality will be the extra software modules that translate scanned text from one language to another.

The price is less than ideal for the traveler who likes to cut corners. At $400, you don’t just need a tidy expense account – you also need to be flying business class all the time. Otherwise, there’s no room for the pen to work properly.

For frequent travelers who don’t do a lot of heavy-duty scanning and crave portability, I’d consider the I.R.I.S.pen as an alternative to a tabletop scanner. But the pen still doesn’t rival the stability and speed of its bigger cousins, and if for no other reason than that, I wouldn’t recommend buying one of the hand-helds as a substitute.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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