TechRadar Verdict
Overall, a portable, fast and useful application for anyone with small to medium scanning needs
Pros
- +
Excellent text-to-speech function
Extremely portable
Convenient
Quick set-up
Cons
- -
Needs practice
Price
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The IRISPen Executive is the latest product from optical character recognition (OCR) specialist company IRIS. It's a small, portable scanning device, and printed information is converted into electronic type by sliding the pen line-by-line over the required text or figures.
It took us a few attempts to get the hang of it, but once we got the hang of things the IRISPen was able to transform tedious manual retyping tasks into fast and accurate scanning experiences.
Admittedly, electronic highlighters and OCR technology have been around for ages, but this latest version of the IRISPen does everything it says on the box - and it even talks. At the press of a button a vocal synthesis reads back the scanned text so you don't even have to look up at the screen for mistakes.
USB powered and connected, the Executive pen is relatively quick and straightforward to set up. A tad more detail in the Quick Start guide wouldn't go amiss, but a quick consultation of the User Guide gave us all the information we needed.
Priced from £110 upwards, the IRISPen executive doesn't come cheap. And it certainly won't be for everyone - don't expect prefect results the first few times you use it. However, for those with small to medium scanning needs, a little patience will be rewarded.
