Wizcom SP1000V SuperPen Translator

Rating:
Summary: Good Tool for travellers and students alike
Review: I tried the SuperPen a couple of days back. It is amazing! You can pick up any text in virtially any language, run your SuperPen over it and abracadabra! it is translated to your choice of language. A little speaker will even say it out to ensure you get the correct pronounciation!
Students, want to make book notes but don't have a laptop or just hate typing? Use the SuperPen. With enough memory to store data worth 1000 pages, you can never run out of space! And transfer your notes to your device(PC, PDA etc) whenever you would like to.
That said, the SuperPen does have a few problems:
1) You have to get used to holding the pen in correct position so that the content can be properly scanned.
2) You gotta run the SuperPen over the printed text slowly or it will garble the data
3) Will NOT work well if you want to scan data off magazines with glossy pages.
4) At $180, the SuperPen is not exactly affordable by all.

CONCLUSION: If you travel abroad a lot or have to take notes from books/reference materials, SuperPen is the best device out there. You will not be disappointed.


Rating:
Summary: Efficient addition to an abridged dual-language dictionary
Review: The superpen SP1000 is easy to setup and works almost as well as advertised. I have the version that supports bilingual dictionaries.

The pen came with a CD and a serial cable to connect to the computer. If you plan to transfer data to, or load dictionaries from, a laptop, check that your laptop has a serial port. The pen is supposed to support IR as well, but my laptop does not detect it (though I didn't really try to make this feature work). I installed the software from CD onto my Windows XP machine and connected the pen with the cable. After setting the pen to use the PC connection I was able to choose my dictionaries and load them onto the pen. The dictionaries took a couple of minutes apiece to load. Due to memory space taken by the applications that are pre-loaded on the pen I was only able to load 2 dictionaries at a time. I believe (not sure) the pro version has more memory so I would suggest investigating that version if you study more than one language or want to use dictionaries with other features like note-taking.

I tried scanning both left-handed and right-handed. In left-handed mode it is easier to see where to place the scanning point in front of the word. The pen rolls smoothly and the character recognition worked well even in a book that is not completely flat and has smallish type.

It is difficult to capture a short word by itself, but scanning several words at a time works well for capturing short words. The pen display allows you to scroll across the scanned words, showing the definition for each word in turn.

I have two reasons for giving the product less than 5 stars. When scanning French the pen does not always accurately identify reflexive verbs preceded by an apostrophe, e.g., s'asseoir should be recognized as a reflexive verb asseoir with a preceding s'. Compared to my pocket Langenscheidt dictionary, the electronic translation dictionary supplied with the superpen provides a lower quality of translation and has fewer alternative word definitions.

I suggest to Wizcom that they partner with a better French dictionary provider, such as Langenscheidt, in order to improve the quality of the translation.