For bar codes, the IRISPen Executive 6 works well. We got a lot of errors when scanning text, but if you’re a slow typist, it might still save you time.

As a bar-code scanner, we have no quarrel with the IRISPen Executive 6 - it read bar codes without errors. Nay, it hacked away at bar codes and made delicious soup stock with their bones. Text scanning, however, was a whole different story.

No matter what medium we scanned, we had errors. Usually the pen combined two words to make one big word, with an occasional character glitch. When we tried to scan text from an old issue of Mac|Life, we had trouble with text near the spine, which prevents the page from laying completely flat. We got better results when we made a photocopy of the page and scanned that, but we were still disappointed in the results - we found 21 errors in a 96-word paragraph. Our results were much better on double-spaced text, where we had 12 errors in a 112-word paragraph.

It may surprise you to hear that we can live with the scanning errors, since it doesn’t take much effort to make corrections. You can scan directly into Microsoft Word or Pages (iWork’s word processor), and use a grammar- or spell-checker. What was frustrating was the IRISPen software. Often, it seemed that our settings changes didn’t take effect. For example, a few times we tried to enabled the software’s Speech feature, a very helpful aide that lets you hear what you’re scanning so you don’t have to look up from your scans to see them onscreen. Sometimes we had to reset the software to factory settings and restart to get it to work on our Leopard-loaded iMac. Other times, the settings would change and be implemented without a hitch.

The bottom line. Even with the time spent making corrections, hunt-and-peck typists will save time using the IRISPen Executive 6 as an OCR scanner, and the bar-code functions work well. Experienced typists are better off reading and retyping text.

COMPANY: IRIS
CONTACT: www.irislink.com
PRICE: $199
REQUIREMENTS: G3 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, USB

Good with bar codes. Helpful speech aide. Universal binary.

Questionable accuracy with single-spaced text. Quirky software. Practice, practice, practice.