Product Reviews

The Iriscan 2 is a single sheet fed scanner and software bundle that's designed to allow you to easily scan documents and have the text converted into a text document that you can then edit.

There are two versions of the Iriscan 2- Executive and Express. The difference between them is £50 and three software applications, none of which work on the Mac. For that reason alone, the Executive version gets a zero rating - if there's a better reason for awarding zero mice than being asked to fork out an extra £50 for something that has no benefit whatsoever, then we've yet to hear it.

Both the Executive and Express versions include a USB-powered 600dpi scanner, a stand, USB cable, carrying case, and copies of Readiris Pro 11 and Cardiris. Setting up the scanner is simple enough, but there's a printed manual in the box just in case you get stuck.

Once installed, Readiris invites you to specify which applications you'd like to use to read RTF, HTML and image documents. And that's it as far as setup goes. To start scanning, simply tell Readiris whether you want to scan the document as text or an image, load your single page into the scanner and press a button.

Unfortunately, that's where we encountered our first problem. Keeping an A4 page straight all the

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way through the scanner proved beyond us. And enabling the software's deskew option slowed down the scanning rate to the point where we could have re-typed - with one finger - the document more quickly than it was scanned. Talking of speed, the Iriscan wasn't particularly fast, even with deskew turned off - it took 63 seconds to scan one A4 page of text.

Thankfully after all that, the results of the optical character recognition were pretty good. One page of a press release that contained a range of symbols and other unusual characters was reproduced with very few errors. Sadly, the same can't be said of image scans. The quality of images was appalling. Areas of white space were generously dappled with flecks of grey noise and text was noticeably blotchy. This is definitely not a scanner to be used for scanning documents to archive as, say, PDFs. For that purpose, Fujitsu's ScanSnap does a much better job.

Cardiris is bundled with both versions of the device and allows you to scan business cards and convert them to VCF, so you can import them to Address Book. There are, however, a number of caveats. Like every business card reader we've tested, it doesn't handle coloured backgrounds at all, so if the business card you want to read doesn't have a white background, forget it. Likewise if the layout of text on the card is out of the ordinary. Standard layouts on white backgrounds fare reasonably well, but we were frustrated that despite specifying Address Book as a default destination for VCFs, we had to save scans as images before re-importing them to Cardiris and converting them.

The Iriscan 2 promises much, but unless all you want to do is scan the odd A4 text page and convert it to RTF, we can't recommend it. And even then, it's frustrating to use and, apart from saving desk space, offers little advantage over a desktop scanner and OCR bundle.