Product Reviews

IRIS's Executive 2 is a slim sheet-feed scanner designed to fit easily into a bag with your laptop. It receives power through your PC's USB port and works by drawing sheets of paper across a CIS scanning head similar to those found in USB-powered flatbed scanners. It has two buttons that can be configured to scan to a specific directory or application with the resolution and colour settings of your choice.

Configuration was fairly straightforward. After installing the driver, we connected the scanner and completed the setup process by feeding in a special calibration sheet. The installation CD also contains Readiris Pro 11 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and CardIris business card management software. Although sheet-feed scanners are not ideal for image capture, IRIS provides a copy of Roxio's PhotoSuite LE 9, which can handle scanned photos and includes a few basic cropping and image correction features. It's a little sluggish and the tools are rather crude, but it's easy to use and does the job.

Also included is @prompt Office 7, which can translate documents from English into Russian, French, German and Portuguese. It made a fair attempt at translation, aided by specialist dictionaries of technical terms, but the

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overall results were no better than translations made by the Babelfish (babelfish.yahoo.com) online translation tool. The main advantage of @prompt Office is that it makes it easy to translate entire documents.

The scanner has a maximum resolution of 600dpi, but quality was generally poor. A4 pages were somewhat skewed, scans suffered from widely spaced pale bands and photo scans were very grainy. The Readiris OCR package that comes with the scanner warns that scans must be at least 300dpi to ensure accurate text recognition. Our results bore this out: a 150dpi scan produced more errors when we ran it through OCR than the same document at 300dpi.

Readiris doesn't have a particularly attractive interface but it's easy to use. We scanned a copy of a page of Shopper with large graphical elements, small font sizes and narrow columns. Readiris created a near-perfect reproduction of this document in RTF format, with only two very minor single-character errors. We were pleased with OCR documents created from standard letters or magazine pages, but unusual font and colour combinations caused numerous errors.

The text-recognition and document management programs are the most useful parts of this entire bundle of hardware and software. Unlike Fujitsu's sheet-feed scanners, the scanner and software can be used separately. Readiris Pro 11 usually costs around £60 by itself. The portable scanner is handy if you want to scan occasional pages on the move, but its image quality isn't particularly good and it's useless for large scan jobs.

If you want a more serious portable scanner, we recommend Fujitsu's ScanSnap S300, which is twice the price but better quality. If you just want good-quality OCR software, we prefer Nuance ScanSoft OmniPage 15.