Rating: 
Summary: Handy but not terribly accurate
Review: Update: My pen has stopped working about two months after I bought it. With that kind of reliability, I can't recommend this product. This is what I thought when it worked:This is a handy device for students and researchers, and at the right price, it can be worth buying. But don't expect anything like 100% accuracy. Depending on the conditions, I find I get at least one error per line, and often more. That may still be acceptable for your purposes, but not if you are unwilling to edit what you've scanned afterwards (and you really have to wait and edit files on your computer--editing with the C Pen is too cumbersome). It's also a little annoying that you have to wait for the C Pen to digest your last line before proceeding, because now and then it will garble the line badly--or fail to scan it entirely--and if you just zip along, you may not be able to follow what you scanned when you read it later. Choosing the right language for your text makes a big difference--I've tested English, German, and French--but the scanner still makes errors in all of the languages I've tried.
Beaming to a PDA is very easy, so if you have a handheld, that feature on the C Pen is an added plus.
All in all, I'm satisfied with the pen for my uses (mostly scanning references in the library), but I would have been happier with more accurate character recognition.
| 
