DAYTON, Ohio -- If you do a lot of research and often need to copy a few lines to use later, the Siemens Pocket Reader was designed with you in mind.
The Pocket Reader is a hand-held scanner weighing only 3 ounces that can read text from magazines, books, legal documents, newspapers, letters and so on and save the text for downloading to a computer later.The manufacturer, Siemens AG Austria, sent a sample to the Dayton Daily News for testing, and it performed fairly well. But minor inaccuracies in reading characters make it more useful for note-taking than for gathering precise data.
The Pocket Reader measures 6 1/4 by 1 1/2 by 1 inches and fits into a pocket almost as neatly as a fountain pen. It runs on a pair of AAA batteries.
To use the reader, you hold it upright and drag it from left to right across a line of type. Built-in character recognition software reads the text and displays it in a readout window along the shaft of the reader.
Pocket Reader can hold up to 40,000 characters, the equivalent of about 20 pages of text, according to Siemens. It scans text that is 8 to 16 points in size, so it captures most common text but not large headlines.
It also captures white type on a black background but may have trouble with some colors of type on colored backgrounds.
The system for getting information out of the Pocket Reader into a computer is outstanding. The gadget comes with a cord that plugs into a serial port on a desk or laptop computer. Plug the cord into a jack on the Pocket Reader, and text automatically transfers into a simple text document.
You can save the text document and use word processing software to clean up any minor errors. You then can get a printout or send the text in an e-mail message.
Pocket Reader is available online at www.PocketReader.com for $169.95. It comes with batteries, a CD containing a tutorial and a program for downloading from the reader to a computer, and the connector to link the device to a computer serial port.