A Useful Tool With Not-So-User-Friendly Connectivity
Written: Apr 27 '06 (Updated Mar 28 '09)
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Pros: Useful Tool, Reasonably Priced, Easy to Operate, Relatively Accurate, Decent Battery Life
Cons: Difficult To Connect, Words Difficult to Correct On Pen
The Bottom Line: A fine purchase for anyone who can use it in a school or work environment and doesn't mind a little frustration when trying to connect it to the computer.
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| noangels's Full Review: Wizcom QuickLink-Pen Elite Handheld Scanner |
I purchased the Wizcom Quicklink-Pen Elite Handheld Scanner for use with my school work. I often outline chapters after I read them and later study from my outlines. The pen scanner seemed to be the perfect thing to buy as it would allow me to scan the text rather then type it, which could be tedious. As much as I love my scanner pen, it can be tedious itself at times!
The size of the pen is good. It is relatively comfortable to hold. In my experience, it is accurate most of the time as long as you're holding it correctly. The pen must be held at a certain angle, dragged at a certain speed, with a certain amount of pressure. It comes with a training tip that can help with this. If you can't get the hang of it you could leave the tip on to make sure you are scanning correctly.
The pen has trouble with words that aren't common, for example, certain words in my biology textbook such as protein names or other topic-specific words were misread occasionally. You also want to make sure the paper is as flat as possible when scanning. I noticed that paper back books in which the paper curves upward toward the binding were harder to scan than hard cover books. I did prefer to scan when it was hooked up directly to a word processor such as MS word which made spotting and correcting scanning errors very easy. Correcting it on the pen directly was tedious, involving either scanning barcodes to spell out letters or using arrow keys repeatedly on the pen itself.
The one big problem was connecting the pen. Scanning into the pen itself is relatively easy. Connecting it to the computer was difficult at times. The software that accompanied it worked at first but the pen stopped working. I emailed their tech support (which was knowledgeable and had a pretty fast response time) and was told to open my control panel and change certain hardware settings on my computer. Eventually I learned the trick of how to make sure it worked correctly every time but each time I did have to readjust port settings and flow controls which was very tedious.
While the pen is easy to operate, I wouldn't recommend it to those who find computers difficult to navigate nor to those who are running any version of Windows prior to Windows XP. You may need to do as I did and adjust certain system settings and many people may not feel comfortable doing that. Also, with plug and play features built in to XP, it should be the easiest Operating System to hook it up to. I found that once I did finally get the pen hooked up correctly and was using it, it made my outlines go a lot faster.
The battery life on the pen is relatively good but I recommend using lithium batteries for longer life and keeping an extra set of them on hand. I usually could scan 50 or so pages of text per set (well what would equate to 50 pages scanned into MS Word). The pen does have a sleep function that shuts the scanner off after it has been out of use for a short period of time to save the battery.
The pen also includes a feature that allows you to scan pictures and obtain definitions of scanned words. These functions worked well but I did not have much use for them.
The price of the pen was reasonable. I paid $159.99 through dell.com. The pen comes with all of the software and cables needed to hook it up to your computer. It also comes with a training tip and a hard case to protect the scanner when not in use. The amount of memory was sufficient. I never ran out of space from one scanning session.
Overall, I would buy this pen for anyone who could find a use for it, as long as they or someone on hand is computer savvy.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 159.99
Interface: USB
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Epinions.com ID:
noangels
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Member: Jamilynn
Location: Staten Island, NY USA
Reviews written: 184
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Thrilled that summer is almost here!
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