First Look: Zpen turns handwriting into text

 

Gallery

Posted on 8 Jul 2008 at 11:11

Dane-Elec's Zpen is an electronic pen and receiver combination that can capture hand-written text as you write it. All you have to do is clip the receiver to the top of a piece of paper, switch it on, and start writing. The pen includes both a transmitter and an ink cartridge, so the letters that appear on the page are also sent to the receiver, which contains a 1GB USB flash drive. You can create a new page simply by unclipping and re-attaching the receiver to a new sheet, and it will add each page to the same saved document.

All the software required is stored on the Zpen, making installation a breeze. MyNotes is an Intelligent Character Reconigition (ICR) program that can scan your saved documents and use handwriting and contextual analysis to convert them into user-editable text that can be pasted into any application.

We were initially sceptical. Even the most basic home scanners now come with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that can convert a scanned document into fairly accurate editable text, but we've never seen an OCR program at any price that can produce even vaguely accurate interpretations of hand-written text.

MyNotes wasn't always right, but it generally did a surprisingly good job of interpreting our scrawled handwritten notes. It did better with some people's handwriting than with others, but a handy Trainer utility allows you to teach it the quirks of your personal writing style.

Also included is the Pen & Ink Viewer, which opens a saved document as an image and can save to PDF format. This is handy for saving copies of hand-drawn images, although we would have preferred to be able to export to an editable graphics format such as BMP, JPG, or TIFF.

So far we're very impressed with the Zpen, although we've encountered trouble running its software on some Windows Vista PCs. We'll be putting it through further tests and including a full review in Shopper 248. You can buy it now from 7dayshop for £72 inc VAT.

Author: Kat Orphanides