The answer to note-taker's prayers?

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Are you a compulsive note-taker, or the sort of person who is forever ripping out interesting articles from newspapers and magazines?

If so, the Quicklink Pen, a fiendishly clever device manufactured by Israeli company Wizcom Technologies , is probably the sort of gadget you have dreamed about.

The Quicklink is a portable, battery-powered scanner that scans snippets of printed text one line at a time, before employing its on-board Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to store the lines as a standard text file. The file may then be transferred to your PC or Palm handheld computer, or even a text-enabled cellphone.

Weighing just 90g and 163mm long, the pen is finished in black plastic and sports seven control buttons and a small LCD screen.

The appearance of the device gives few clues to its purpose. It could be mistaken for an advanced TV remote controller or a high-tech nasal hair trimmer.

But underneath a protective cover on the angled head is a clue to its true function. Here is a tiny roller, marked with black and white spiral stripes like a barber shop sign, that is used by an electronic eye to measure the movement of the pen across the page.

This, together with a laser beam that is similar to a supermarket checkout bar-code reader, creates an electronic image of characters as they pass the scanner head. This image is then translated into standard ASCII text by an "OCR-on-a-chip" system developed by Ligature.

Text is saved to the 2Mb flash memory card provided, which is capable of storing 1000 pages of text at a time. The QuickLink Pen offers on-board editing facilities but it also comes with a set of utilities for transfer by serial interface or infra-red port to edit the text on a PC.

There are a few limitations, the main one that this is a printed-text-only scanner so it cannot be used for photographs, graphics or handwritten notes.

The type may be in bold or italics, but it must normally be between 6 and 22 points in size, which in practical terms represents, for example, the size of small print on an insurance policy, up to about half the size of the headline at the top of this article.

The makers claim the pen achieves 97 per cent accuracy, which would put it almost on a par with software that comes with flatbed scanners and not too far behind human touch-typists.

Unfortunately, our first results were disappointing. Scanning the phrase "Deposed Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry drank kava" from a Herald news story was read by the pen as: "Deposed Prime Minister h~ahendra Chaudbrir drank kana."

While spell-checking software could sort out the misspelling of common nouns, the spelling of a surname is not something that can easily checked without reference to the source.

The OCR software was also easily fooled by fancy typefaces, and refused point-blank to read reversed out (white on black) text. These two snags are likely to be encountered when scanning business cards, for example, which is suggested by Wizcom as an ideal application for the pen.

Scanning my own business card, the gothic type of the New Zealand Herald logo came out as "She Idem Mahant 4Jhemt~." Okay, that was a tough test, but less excusable was my name being misread as Michael Eoretnan, even though it was clearly printed at about 12 points in Times Bold. If I received a letter addressed like that from a mailing list it would probably go straight into the bin.

Perversely, the scanner made a better job of the addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses at the bottom of the card - even though these were printed very small at 6 points, reading them all without a hitch.

Paul Gordon, of New Zealand distributor Interniche Technologies, based in Titirangi, said there was a knack to using the scanner.

It was certainly true that after a little more practice we got better results. We found it is important to move the scanner steadily across the page with an action similar to using a highlighter pen.

But at $499 including GST, the Quicklink costs four times the price of the cheapest desktop scanners.

However, you are paying for the miniaturisation, and there are plenty of times when you may want to store a sentence or two rather than a whole page at a time as with a desktop scanner. The QuickLink also comes with a wide variety of utilities to tackle anything from scanning tables of data to storing internet addresses directly as browser favourites.

But while showing a lot of promise, I still need to be convinced the QuickLink Pen will deliver better accuracy.

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Wizcom Technologies