The reason I’m mentioning that is because if you read these ‘oddly positive’ reviews (that imply you need to practice to get it right) and you might be tempted to reckon that other people didn’t try. I know when I bought this I was trying to be optimistic, and believed that. Well, even after many, many hours of persisting with this thing, the degree of errors and the horrendously long delay in scanning made had me in tears.

To clarify why – scanning is a fully synchronous operation – that is, during that ‘thinking time’ the thing ignores any future scanning. It doesn’t buffer and let you keep doing your thing while it’s processing the last lot – INCREDIBLY frustrating because you’re constantly waiting for it and trying avoid it wasting even more of your time. Each time while waiting you’ll reckon “I could probably type it quicker and more reliably”. That’s EACH LINE people, and each time it happens you’ll detest this pen a small bit more. It doesn’t let you end the passage or page and to do it’s delay, so you could go and do something constructive like clean the fish tank. No, as soon as you hit the end of the line it becomes a small time vampire. And before you reckon “well I’m mostly scanning long lines”, well consider that the longer the line the longer that delay.

It’s a toss up whether that delay wastes more time than what you’ll spend correcting all the screw ups this thing makes. You sure as hell could never use the pen interface to fix the errors, so you’ll just have to go back and fix them later – but – you can’t leave it too long because this thing screws up so terrible that it’s hard to even guess what the original text was. So if it was something you’d scanned in the library, make sure you loan the book so you can refer to the original text when you right the complete garble in the scanned file you’ll have on nearly every line. Another point – for anything which isn’t dictionary, you can just forget it. It’s like 100% failure on URLs or pretty much anything which you couldn’t type manually. So in the one case you wouldn’t trust yourself typing information manually, and might be willing to tolerate it’s inexcusable tardiness, this product is an abject failure.

The interface on the device and the PC software gave me flashbacks to 20 years ago when you’d just wonder whether the people who made it really tried to use it. Amazingly the software somehow manages to parallel the failure of the hardware. There is no concept of ‘plug and play’, I spent many hours before I really got it to work, and I couldn’t tell you what I did the twentieth time differently from the first time, when it suddenly was recognized by my PC. Mind you, I tried this on a few computers too, so it’s not my device. Once you get the software working, you’ll realize what a total dog it is and what an cryptic and archaic system it has for installing and managing updates and modules on the device. The only explanation I could give for such an unusable piece of software was that maybe it’s really psychological genius – maybe they made the software deliberately painful as some sort of tolerance boot camp, so the device itself appears relatively reliable.

Which would all be worth it if the thing worked of course, but since it will only make you shake your head and wonder if there really is a god, each and every single line you scan until the day you return it or throw it in the bin, it’s really unforgivable.

In summary, I’d relate my experience with this product to that of having a psycho ex-girlfriend. You just regret the day you met her and wonder why you invested so much time into the relationship, hoping things would change. Spending enough time with either will cost you thousands in psychotherapy too.