Yeah... I know it's pricey, but it looks like it would do wonderful things. Now whether it will *actually* do those wonderful things is a whole other discussion, hence my request for feedback. Apparently it will do vertical column text on the PC (not so sure about the Mac), and the bits and pieces I've found have said that it does a good job of OCR if you get the Asian version. I wouldn't worry too much about the translating version-- I don't think it does Asian languages, anyway. (And having it translate for you would defeat the whole purpose of self-study, right?)

It's not especially cheap, but I'd be willing to drop $200 if it does what it says it does.

I found a review video but it's in Chinese. Maybe someone here who understands it can let us know the verdict. He tests Japanese around 4:30 and it looks pretty good. The mac version of the software looks pretty slick. It seems to have some Spotlight integration but I'm not sure what he's doing at the end of the video.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9FMOQWci83o

Transtic wrote:

If you have a normal scanner you can do the same with office's language tools.

That's true: my scanner automatically tries to OCR my drawings whenever I scan them in. I've never thought about applying that to sentence mining (er, plucking) though. Seems like too much of a hassle with big textbooks though.

My Chinese isn't really that great, but what I could make out was quite positive. He was mentioning the relative dpis of previous models (300, 700, etc). He was then saying that the scanner could handle traditional (I believe dude is Taiwanese) and simplified Chinese texts as well as Japanese. He had no trouble with any of them, it was all accurate.

There seemed to be a bit of a snag using Windows and vertical text. I'm not quite sure what the issue was, and I'm not about to go play the guess-what-the-word-is-and-try-to-look-it-up game that I used to play in the PRC, but he did tell us to take note of it.

He seemed overall pretty happy with it. I wasn't sure what the point of the Spotlight thing at the end was, though. Please take what I said with a truckload of salt as I am not a Chinese expert. Someone with more Chinese skill (native speakers, anyone?)  should, if inclined, should definitely add to / refute what I'm saying to clarify.

From what I'm gathering on the review, though, this looks good for sentence...uh...mining - unless you worry that hand-copying things actually is helpful (debatable, but a tiny worry in my head). For $200, though - considering that a lot of textbooks (this coming from a recent college grad) can run you $100+ - that ain't so bad. I could probably be conned into buying this, and I'm poor.

Since it needs to be attached to at least a laptop, I don't think it will be that portable. It would be far better if it could store data internally so you could carry it about with you and then download the contents to your PC later. That would give it a significant advantage over a normal scanner.

Transtic wrote:

Put it onto the "Reading tutor" and make your own glossary (J-J, of course) automatically

Whoa, never seen that before: very cool!

rich_f wrote:

I bit the bullet and just ordered the IRIS Executive Asian from the company's website. We'll see how well it works in a few days.

Excellent!

I have IRIS standard Asian OCR software, which is very good.

But I will be very interested to see how the pen works. If it works well I think I'll get one. So, please let us know what you think of it...

Mark

After further fiddling, you can move and resize the scan preview window anywhere on the screen you want. But I'd suggest cleaning up your desktop.

Also, the executive will do multi-line scanning, but after trying it in both JP and Eng, I wouldn't recommend it. It's tricky to get a good scanning subject that way, and it's just faster to do it one line at a time.

EDIT: Actually, using the small-text option is a situational thing. Some had suggested to do it to improve overall scan accuracy, but sometimes it would OCR the furigana to replace the kanji, especially when the furigana is below the kanji. Also, to improve accuracy, you need to calibrate it for each book/item you scan. I found that significantly lowered mis-reads. And don't move the pen too fast. A slow, steady pace will give you a better scan.

Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar puts boxes around some text. (Not much of it, though.) The scanner hates this. Not much you can do about that.

Finally, the software is a little on the buggy side. It's already hard-crashed on me once when switching from Firefox to Word. Yanking the pen out and putting it back in, then restarting the S/W seemed to work fine.

Last edited by rich_f (2008 January 09, 4:44 pm)

suffah wrote:

Knowing what you know now, would you have bought it?

Well, it's a little too soon to say for sure, but yeah, I probably would. I'm still having a tough time justifying the extra $100 for the Executive. I never could find out if there's any difference in models, hardware-wise. (I suspect not.)

There is a difference in software, but I don't know if it's $100 worth of difference, based on what I plan on using it for, and based on how the software itself performs. Someone needs to buy the $200 model and see how well it scans the same sentences in the same books. (I have a crapton of Japanese textbooks and reference books, so that shouldn't be a problem.)

The hardware performs pretty well. The software is a little glitchy, but I haven't checked for a patch yet. The company's customer support doesn't do much to inspire me, and the product I received was obviously an open box model, sold for the new price. (Which kind of irks me. Not that it matters a whole lot in the actual functioning, but when I buy something, I expect new unless stated otherwise. And if it's open box, I expect a discount.)

I haven't had time to mess with Anki yet, but I have messed with it in Word 2007, and it works in that, too. If you have problems with it, try setting Windows' input mode to JP.

Bottom line: It sure beats the hell out of typing, and that pretty much trumps everything else.

It works with Mac, too, but I have no idea how well, or what features may be missing on the Mac version.

It's deliberate, but not too slow. If you go too fast, it doesn't scan well. To scan the first line from "Wolf and Spice," it took about 5-10 seconds per swipe. Then you just hit the button on the side of the pen to hit return (or whatever key/command you want to assign to it) if you want to enter a new line.

So it's about as fast as a fast typist, unless you have problems scanning, in which case it's as fast as a slow typist who makes mistakes. Since the image you scan shows up on the screen as well as the text it OCRs, you can compare the two pretty quickly. That would probably be the only thing that could slow you down- comparing your scanned text with the actual text.

I'll have a better idea when I spend some time with it later today with Anki. I've got 375 cards to clear in Anki before I start putting in new sentences...

Scanning with a pen vs. scanning with a flatbed is comparing apples and oranges in a way. Allow me to elaborate a bit:

When you scan with a flatbed, the machine does all the work of moving the scanner head at the proper speed and holding the paper down.

When you scan with a pen, you're doing all of the work. The surfaces are never flat like a flatbed scanner plate, the lighting isn't uniform because of your shadow on the book, the book itself is uneven, and may tend to tip (because you're probably holding the book with one hand, and the scanner with another). And you have to line it up and keep it even, straight, etc. All of these are things produce the sort of resulting scans that a flatbed scanner-based OCR doesn't have to interpret, and probably is not designed to interpret.

So a flatbed OCR is going to be better suited to working on flatbed scans. A pen scanner OCR is going to be better at dealing with pen scans where the scan isn't uniform, even, and precise. Pen-made scans run to the wonky because we're not robots.

So yes, it will make more errors, but that's because you will make more errors than your flatbed will. Thankfully the software is specifically designed with that in mind, so it will do a better job of catching those errors than flatbed OCR will. Flatbed OCR probably isn't written with such a fringe tool in mind, so I seriously doubt it would even be able to understand what is going on, let alone what it's trying to decipher.

It's all about workflow and what you're comfortable with. If you're happy, then stick with it. I like the pen because it's small and doesn't get in my way, and I don't want to mess with scanning whole pages when I only want 4-5 sentences on a page, tops. It really will come down to your personal preferences in the end.