Laptop Store
WizCom WSP1000P SuperPen Professional
RRP: $200.00
Our Price: $149.64
You Save: $ 50.36 ( 25% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: WizCom
Publisher: WizCom
Brand: WizCom
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $149.64
You Save: $ 50.36 ( 25% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: WizCom
Publisher: WizCom
Brand: WizCom
Average Customer Rating:
WizCom WSP1000P SuperPen Professional Description
Binding: Electronics
Brand: WizCom
EAN: 0630913000431
Product Features: Recognizes English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Swedish
Format: CD-ROM
Is Autographed: 0
Is Memorabilia: 0
Label: WizCom
Manufacturer: WizCom
Model: WSP1000P
Platform: Microsoft XP Media Center Edition
Publisher: WizCom
Studio: WizCom
Brand: WizCom
EAN: 0630913000431
Product Features: Recognizes English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Swedish
Format: CD-ROM
Is Autographed: 0
Is Memorabilia: 0
Label: WizCom
Manufacturer: WizCom
Model: WSP1000P
Platform: Microsoft XP Media Center Edition
Publisher: WizCom
Studio: WizCom
WizCom WSP1000P SuperPen Professional Features
Recognizes English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Swedish
Stores up to 1,000 pages of printed text
Text-to-speech technology
Optical character recognition with 97% accuracy
IRDA and 9-pin serial port interfaces, optional USB
Stores up to 1,000 pages of printed text
Text-to-speech technology
Optical character recognition with 97% accuracy
IRDA and 9-pin serial port interfaces, optional USB
Editorial Review of WizCom WSP1000P SuperPen Professional
The WizCom SuperPen Professional is the latest productivity tool. This completely mobile device instantly provides users with the English definitions of over a quarter of a million words.SuperPen Professional can also scan, store and transfer printed data to a PDA, PC or any Windows application making it the perfect tool for busy executive and college student alike.SuperPen Professional enables users to scan professional terms and receive instantaneous definitions from one or a number of the on-board professional dictionaries. Integrated Text-to-Speech technology enables users to pronounce new words with confidence.Scan, store and transfer function enables users, on the go, to capture essential printed data (text and small images) anytime, anywhere. The product can store over 1,000 pages of printed text, to be transferred to PC or PDA. Users working with their computer can scan printed text directly to the active cursor point. Collected data can be transferred to any Windows based application seamlessly.
Customer Reviews of WizCom WSP1000P SuperPen Professional
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: make sure jack is plugged in ALL THE WAY
Review: Okay, I know it sounds dumb and obvious, but if you can't get the pen to communicate with your PC, make sure to push the cable jack is pushed in completely. I have a film background and am used to using a variety of cables and electronic devices, so when I read the advice in the help section of the desktop program about checking the jack and the batteries I thought yeah, yeah I'm not an idiot. So, I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver and desktop program twice from the disk and once from the wizcomtech.com downloadable files. I was convinced the program wasn't installed properly (especially because of the little white and blue icon in the top left of the title bar which usually shows up when a program is not responding). Finally I looked at the help file again and tried pushing the jack in more. It went "click" and all was well from there. Believe me, even if you're conviced the jack is in all the way, push it in harder until you hear a distinct "click."
Also, to reiterate what others have said, the innacurate text recognition is almost always due to scanning too fast or not holding the pen at the appropriate angle. When I get a line that scans poorly, if I scan it a second time and focus more on going slowly and holding the pen correctly nine times out of ten it comes out much better. I found especially that the ends of lines scanned badly because (without realizing it)as I crossed the page I would tilt the pen instead of moving my hand.
This product isn't perfect and will make some errors no matter what you do, but it is far better and more useful than I had hoped. It is better than other text recognition software I've used and so convenient for taking notes for graduate school from library books I can't write in. I also use a lot of primary documents from the early modern period and earlier and the pen can actually occasionally read some of that text as well. I didn't really intend to use it for that type of work anyway and I wouldn't recommend it for text pre 19th/18th century or so, but it's nice to know it may be possible in some instances. It also sometimes has trouble reading modern typefaces that are in italics or a bit large. It's a bit hit or miss if you go outside standard typefaces, but for most body text of books and magazines it's great.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Unusable and Worthless
Review: Even after the supposed training of the pen, out of 20 scans it did not completely recognize the text once. It is very position sensitive and the technology needs to be significantly improved.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Review of WizCom WSP1000P Line Scaner
Review: I am using the to take notes for my various on-line and research projects. While the results are about 90% correct, I can usually fill in the blanks, and it is much much better than hand written notes. I would recommend this product to any student or researcher that does not need to take entire pages of verbatim notes. For what I am using it for it is well worth the money.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Please, people, take these negative reviews seriously
Review: This product is almost impossible to configure with your PC unless you have a PhD in computer science. NOTHING works out of the box...I've tried to follow some of the suggestions that other reviewers have posted with no result. There is little if any documentation that comes with the pen and I'm not sure that I'm getting great reliability with the scanning device itself presuming if I can ever figure out how to upload the scanned information into Word.
I rarely resort to using all caps in any message I write BUT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE BUY THIS PRODUCT! The posted technical advice from users should have been the warning to me not to buy this and the negative reviews are accurate. This product just doesn't seem to work well and in 2008 if an intelligent but not professional computer user cannot get an electronic product to work out-of-the-box, or close to it, then the device is very badly designed...and this device IS very badly designed.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Once you get it to work it is very useful
Review: As many others, I wasted 2 hours before I got this device (synchronization) to work. As someone said the whole product seems as if they stopped developing 5 years ago. But keep in mind that devices produced some years ago can still be very useful ;) Plus the age is reflected in a fair price.
I'm looking forward for such a scanner to be part of every mobile phone but until then this is the product to buy.
Especially as you can avoid waisting the mentioned 2 hours if you are lucky enough to stumble apon this review :}
I really find this product very useful and time-saving. I read a lot and always highlight important passages in my books. The process of going back and typing all the highlighted passages was very tedious and time consuming.
With the Superpen, scanning the passages is now a breeze. However, one must get used to it first. For example, there is a certain way to hold the pen (a certain angle) and certain speed to scan your text. If you do it right, you might get a 100% correct output. However, if you do it wrong, you might get an output as low as 30% of the intended result. Take time and experiment and in no time you'll find yourself an expert at scanning text with this device.
One problem I found in the beginning was the synchronization process between this device and my computer. The pen just couldn't synchronize with my computer, and I spent hours going through the support web pages and installing and re-installing the software a couple of times. At the end, the problem turned out to be the USB cable not fully snapped inside the SuperPen. Make sure you hear the snap when you insert the front end of the USB cable into the SuperPen. This can easily be overlooked as the cable will seem to be snuggly inserted into the device.
If you need for any reason to change the properties of your USB driver to hardware flow, do the following in Windows XP:
Start / control panel / system / hardware / device manager
When you are at the device `manager screen' click on the `+' sign next to `Ports (COM & LPT)'. Make sure your USB cable is plugged into your computer. Then right-click on `Prolific USB-to-serial COMM port', and click on properties. Go to the `Port settings' tab, and in the `flow control' menu, select hardware.
If you often take notes and find it time consuming to type the passages you highlighted, this pen will be a required item that you won't be able to live without.
This pen also has other features such as reading a word aloud (it even comes with headphones), and giving you a definition of any word you scan. You can also scan passages in different languages, such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish.
I really recommend this product, but keep in mind that you have to be patient at first and be willing to spend time learning how to use this product. Once this is done, you won't believe how you ever lived without it!
It even worked on my MacBook with BootCamp. Use Quicklink to synchronize! I never got InfraRed and AddOns to work, but thats not important.
After I found out that synched files are automatically saved as text files (.doc extension but plaintext, not only .qnt files as stated otherwise) I readily gave it 4 stars.
Review Summary: make sure jack is plugged in ALL THE WAY
Review: Okay, I know it sounds dumb and obvious, but if you can't get the pen to communicate with your PC, make sure to push the cable jack is pushed in completely. I have a film background and am used to using a variety of cables and electronic devices, so when I read the advice in the help section of the desktop program about checking the jack and the batteries I thought yeah, yeah I'm not an idiot. So, I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver and desktop program twice from the disk and once from the wizcomtech.com downloadable files. I was convinced the program wasn't installed properly (especially because of the little white and blue icon in the top left of the title bar which usually shows up when a program is not responding). Finally I looked at the help file again and tried pushing the jack in more. It went "click" and all was well from there. Believe me, even if you're conviced the jack is in all the way, push it in harder until you hear a distinct "click."
Also, to reiterate what others have said, the innacurate text recognition is almost always due to scanning too fast or not holding the pen at the appropriate angle. When I get a line that scans poorly, if I scan it a second time and focus more on going slowly and holding the pen correctly nine times out of ten it comes out much better. I found especially that the ends of lines scanned badly because (without realizing it)as I crossed the page I would tilt the pen instead of moving my hand.
This product isn't perfect and will make some errors no matter what you do, but it is far better and more useful than I had hoped. It is better than other text recognition software I've used and so convenient for taking notes for graduate school from library books I can't write in. I also use a lot of primary documents from the early modern period and earlier and the pen can actually occasionally read some of that text as well. I didn't really intend to use it for that type of work anyway and I wouldn't recommend it for text pre 19th/18th century or so, but it's nice to know it may be possible in some instances. It also sometimes has trouble reading modern typefaces that are in italics or a bit large. It's a bit hit or miss if you go outside standard typefaces, but for most body text of books and magazines it's great.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Unusable and Worthless
Review: Even after the supposed training of the pen, out of 20 scans it did not completely recognize the text once. It is very position sensitive and the technology needs to be significantly improved.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Review of WizCom WSP1000P Line Scaner
Review: I am using the to take notes for my various on-line and research projects. While the results are about 90% correct, I can usually fill in the blanks, and it is much much better than hand written notes. I would recommend this product to any student or researcher that does not need to take entire pages of verbatim notes. For what I am using it for it is well worth the money.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Please, people, take these negative reviews seriously
Review: This product is almost impossible to configure with your PC unless you have a PhD in computer science. NOTHING works out of the box...I've tried to follow some of the suggestions that other reviewers have posted with no result. There is little if any documentation that comes with the pen and I'm not sure that I'm getting great reliability with the scanning device itself presuming if I can ever figure out how to upload the scanned information into Word.
I rarely resort to using all caps in any message I write BUT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE BUY THIS PRODUCT! The posted technical advice from users should have been the warning to me not to buy this and the negative reviews are accurate. This product just doesn't seem to work well and in 2008 if an intelligent but not professional computer user cannot get an electronic product to work out-of-the-box, or close to it, then the device is very badly designed...and this device IS very badly designed.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Once you get it to work it is very useful
Review: As many others, I wasted 2 hours before I got this device (synchronization) to work. As someone said the whole product seems as if they stopped developing 5 years ago. But keep in mind that devices produced some years ago can still be very useful ;) Plus the age is reflected in a fair price.
I'm looking forward for such a scanner to be part of every mobile phone but until then this is the product to buy.
Especially as you can avoid waisting the mentioned 2 hours if you are lucky enough to stumble apon this review :}
I really find this product very useful and time-saving. I read a lot and always highlight important passages in my books. The process of going back and typing all the highlighted passages was very tedious and time consuming.
With the Superpen, scanning the passages is now a breeze. However, one must get used to it first. For example, there is a certain way to hold the pen (a certain angle) and certain speed to scan your text. If you do it right, you might get a 100% correct output. However, if you do it wrong, you might get an output as low as 30% of the intended result. Take time and experiment and in no time you'll find yourself an expert at scanning text with this device.
One problem I found in the beginning was the synchronization process between this device and my computer. The pen just couldn't synchronize with my computer, and I spent hours going through the support web pages and installing and re-installing the software a couple of times. At the end, the problem turned out to be the USB cable not fully snapped inside the SuperPen. Make sure you hear the snap when you insert the front end of the USB cable into the SuperPen. This can easily be overlooked as the cable will seem to be snuggly inserted into the device.
If you need for any reason to change the properties of your USB driver to hardware flow, do the following in Windows XP:
Start / control panel / system / hardware / device manager
When you are at the device `manager screen' click on the `+' sign next to `Ports (COM & LPT)'. Make sure your USB cable is plugged into your computer. Then right-click on `Prolific USB-to-serial COMM port', and click on properties. Go to the `Port settings' tab, and in the `flow control' menu, select hardware.
If you often take notes and find it time consuming to type the passages you highlighted, this pen will be a required item that you won't be able to live without.
This pen also has other features such as reading a word aloud (it even comes with headphones), and giving you a definition of any word you scan. You can also scan passages in different languages, such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish.
I really recommend this product, but keep in mind that you have to be patient at first and be willing to spend time learning how to use this product. Once this is done, you won't believe how you ever lived without it!
It even worked on my MacBook with BootCamp. Use Quicklink to synchronize! I never got InfraRed and AddOns to work, but thats not important.
After I found out that synched files are automatically saved as text files (.doc extension but plaintext, not only .qnt files as stated otherwise) I readily gave it 4 stars.