I, like several others in the group, ordered a QuickLink Pen following the demonstration at our monthly meeting in July. I am fairly skeptical of such items, but the actual scanning of text we selected at the meeting convinced me that it works. The amazing part being that it performs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) right after scanning in a line of text, and in the demonstration the results were quick and accurate. With the thought that I must surely have a use for such an item, and if I didn't my daughter would, I ordered one at the special user group price of $129.

Of course, when I got home I had second thoughts and wondered if I really needed the pen. Then I wondered some more after I went to Amazon.com and saw they were selling the pen for $116 plus shipping. Well, the presenter was a real nice guy, and I appreciated him telling us about the pen. Otherwise I probably would have never known about it, so I wasn't going to complain too much about six or seven dollars more than necessary. Also, a check of other online retailers showed the pen selling for considerably more, e.g. $150.

How do I feel after receiving my pen and trying it out? Well, I am still not sure that I really have a need for it, but it does work quite well—with a little practice.

Here is a paragraph scanned with the pen from Page 535 in chapter 15 of Professional Active Server Pages 2.0. I have enclosed the correct word in [ ] where an error occurred.

Not bad. It made errors in the words Once, along, and with. Missing the O in Once could be attributed to the page needing to be flattened more, since there was a large curve toward the binding, and I flattened it more before scanning in the next line. Also it is always possible that my hand wavered a bit when I went over the words "along with". And that brings me to my main problem with the pen--I get a bit tense trying to concentrate on keeping it on a straight path directly over the line being scanned.

Having the text only in the pen really doesn’t do you much good. You want it in your computer. To get it into your computer, you have three routes: A serial connection (provided) between the pen and your computer, an infrared connection if your computer supports this, and finally beaming to a Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor. The last method is the one I used first. I beamed what I had scanned to a memo in my Handspring Visor, then Hot-Synced the Visor with my computer.

To use the infrared or the serial connection, you need to install the QuickLink Desktop Application on your computer. This also gives you several more features. One is Scan to PC when you have the pen connected to the computer with the serial cable.

I just used the pen to scan in the following text that describes this feature. Only one error was made, and that could be attributed to the left margin of the text being close to a dark vertical band in the manual. The manual says:

At this point, I was still getting the scanned text in my PC via a beam to the Visor and then a Hot-Sync to the PC. Time to try out the serial connection between the PC and the pen. After following the instructions in the Communications Wizard of the QuickLink Desktop, I could not get the PC and the pen to communicate. Well, the first problem was that I needed to change the serial setting from COM1 to COM2, since that was where the pen was connected. (In this day of USB I have almost forgotten about COM ports.) Still no communications.

A good bit of thinking and tinkering with the settings, then I remembered that on my last trip I couldn't get my laptop computer's modem to work. A little sleuthing there showed me that the modem thought the COM port was busy, and I discovered that was caused by my Visor's Hot-Sync program running on the laptop. Once I closed that, the modem worked fine. Even though the Hot-Syncing uses a USB port it somehow makes other applications think the COM port is busy. Once I recalled that, all I had to do to get the PC and the pen to communicate was to close the same Visor Hot-Sync program on my main computer.

Now I, among other things, could scan a few lines of text directly into any Windows application running on my computer. Here is what I brought into Word from the Quick Link manual:

Only two errors occurred. Pretty good, and it was also fairly fast.

The QuickLink Pen does not do quite as well on the Tampa Tribune, making errors in four of 85 words scanned in one trial. I got similar results in other trials.

It works equally well when rolled left to right as when rolled right to left. The latter method is easier for me since I can see the text being scanned easier in that mode.

You can get extra memory (proprietary flash memory) for the pen which will allow you to scan in more than the average 1000 pages with the normal 2 MB of memory. Of course, no one is probably going to need to store more than 1000 pages. But the extra memory also allows you to run dictionary and language translation modules that you can download for free from the company’s web site, http://www.wizcomtech.com. Additionally it will allow you to run additional applications developed in the future.

WizCom Technologies also makes other version of the pen: the Quicktionary II and the Reading Pen II. The Quicktionary II does translations and definitions of words and contains a voice module so that you can hear the results. The Reading Pen II is meant for individuals with reading problems and provides audible definitions and pronunciations.

WizCom apparently is not alone in having the idea of a scanning pen. They have competition from C-Pen, http://www.cpen.com. u