IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe GPEN200N (Black)
by IOGEAR
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List Price: Our Price: $100.00 You Save: $29.95 (23%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Personal Computer See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe GPEN200N (Black)
Customer Review: The refill issue
Summary: 3 Stars
The refill is easy to find if you understand that the item is considered a "mini-ballpoint refill". The specific refill that works in the digital pen is the Schmidt mini-ballpoint refill. Google that and you'll find it.
I like the product but the documentation is inadequate. It says there are menu options that don't exist and leaves you in the dark about lot of things. I still don't understand what a paper holder is all about and its function.
Customer Review: My first couple of days
Summary: 3 Stars
Was completely amazed at how well what I wrote was actually digitised - and accurately so. That really blew me away. Compared to other tablet devices - it is really value for money. Also, the pen was amazingly light and like a normal pen.
As a mouse though it was not too smooth. The included software could do with some improvement - but it's acceptable.
Customer Review: it works but OCR useless and too clunky still
Summary: 2 Stars
it's a wonderful idea and as an avid note taker, i really wanted to like this product and i really wanted to give it a go - even to the point of missing my return window with amazon. (but once again, amazon proves itself to be freakin' awesome and they allowed me to return it anyway and even re-imbursed me the postage i paid to send it back to them. so as a digression, product not great, amazon, totally great!)
ultimately, the deal killer is the software and the fundamental technology.
the technology first:
the receiver uses ultrasound triangulation to figure out the position of the pen and then uses a pressure sensor on the pen itself to figure out when it is being depressed to make a mark. ingenious!
but the problem is that because the ultrasound emitter/receivers are on two sides of the clip on gadget, the triangulation is not perfect and invariably results in your writing coming out instead of on a straight line, on a curve... even though you wrote it perfectly straight on a line on your paper.
the closer you are to the sensor, the more severe the curve but if you're trying to anticipate a distance away from the sensor where lines come out perfectly straight, you're probably gonna end up half way down the page.
now this alone is not a deal breaker. if you just want an image copy of your writing in digital form, this is perfectly acceptable. the curve is not really severe and your writing is clearly legible (or at least as legible as your writing is normally :) ).
but the bad part comes when you expect to use the OCR. during "training" where you try to teach the ocr program your writing style, it actually prompts you to "make sure you write on a straight line"... !!!
and because your writing is invariably curved when digitized, the ocr starts creating line breaks where it thinks you're trying to create a new line of text and basically it makes hash out of your writing.
any hopes of OCR translation are lost - at least i have found this to be so when trying to write non trivial documents instead of big exaggerated single words on the page as examples.
finally, the software is extremely clunky. it just keeps popping up too many windows and is just not sleek or handy enough to be truly transparent for a person who just wants good organized notes. the fact that the ocr is a separate program and window that pops up when you try to invoke it is extremely crude and for a product like this, the ocr really should be integrated. i give iogear props for even having integration tight enough so that an invocation of ocr pops it up automatically but the fact that it's not more cleanly and smoothly integrated is problematic.
i suspect this inelegance of software will make a product like the solidtek/acecad digimemos useless for me as well. (those products do NOT use echolocation and instead uses a graphics tablet like proximity sensor so you'll at least get straight lines of writing though so it might be suitable for ocr).
so for the time being, i'll have to hold off on this digital writing capture stuff... i have a feeling the anoto pens from logitech and others will be as clunky and the cost of the special paper is just something i can't abide and the tablets would probably suffer the same inelegance in software implementation.
the best thing might still be to just take a scan of my writing or maybe even a cell phone photo... that might be a better way to go.
anyway, that was my personal experience. ymmv. but in any case, i highly recommend that you try the product in a real world test case from writing to filing and ocring on a computer before you commit to a purchase. cuz for me, it was a good idea that simply ends up being a useless toy.
jin
Customer Review: Vista users, especially left-handed, beware!
Summary: 2 Stars
Product does seem to transmit writing fairly well from the pen to the receiver block, but Vista users aren't able to place the receiver block in the most preferred orientation for left-handers. It lets you choose this orientation at initial setup, but won't recognize it when you actually use it.
Multiple work-arounds were tried, including running in various compatibility modes, reinstalling drivers, and verifying drivers and firmware were most recent. A call to the manufacturer confirmed that the block for Vista users can only be placed in the center top placement.
Less of a problem for right-handers perhaps, but lefties will often block the signal to the transmitter with their hand. If you force the receiver block to side at the intended proper angle, the text will be shown slanted, and the OCR will not translate.
The only remotely suitable way I found a Vista lefty to be able to use this product was to place the receiver block at the bottom of your writing pad, then when uploading rotate the image 90 degrees before doing the OCR.
In short, if you're an XP user you get the full set of orientations, but Vista users don't. I have two computers and if I were willing to use exclusively on the XP computer, I'd be ok. But if you plan on transmitting directly to the Vista, you're stuck.
Customer Review: Clarification for OSX
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this item based on the "works with OSX" review. Having received it, I have found that it does in an extremely limited fashion. For clarity's sake I must mention that I am running 10.6.2 and have a Wacom Tablet driver installed which may have some inpact on the outcome. With that configuration, in wired "mouse" mode the pen produces text in OSX's Ink utility which gets transcribed into text. The text recognition, which I would expect to be better than the Wacom as I can actually see what I am writing, is about 75% as accurate as writing with the Wacom.It also has massive margins so you are limited to writing in a small box in the center of the page and there are no Mac utilities to aid in correcting this. In addition I have yet to find a way of transferring anything beyond page 1 of the saved TIFF notes files and no way of deleting the files from the mobile unit so after about 200 pages unless I can resolve this it will be useless.
Overall I would say that unless you intend to primarily use with a PC and maybe occasionaly use it for non-critical direct text entry or doodles on a Mac it is not a good buy. With the benefit of hindsight, for Mac only users I would recommend avoiding this product.