Tue, 06 Apr 2010 FineReader Express for Mac review
Say goodbye to tedious retyping, OCR may finally have come of age
- Manufacturer: ABBYY
- Pros: Admirable speed and precision; sensible pricing; manual selections for text and data cells; supports most image types for input
- Cons: Requires TWAIN-compliant scanner for full compatibility; no OCR solution is 100 pe cent accurate
- Price: £79
- Star rating:
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, such as handwriting, automatic-translation and voice-recognition programs, get some bad press. If you haven’t used OCR apps in a long time, then ABBYY’s FineReader Express will come as a surprise. It works, and works well, with very little configuration or user tweaking.
FineReader Express scans and parses text from existing image files, an attached camera or documents read from a flatbed scanner. It’s smart enough to render the results as plain text, HTML or PDF, but the most impressive feature is its ability to convert to spreadsheet format.
A friendly dialog box pops up to help you make your choice the moment you launch the app. First, your scanner needs to be fully TWAIN compliant. We then tried various tasks. At a reasonable resolution of 600dpi results were very accurate, though processing a page of text took a few minutes. We took it down a couple of notches to 150dpi and the results were still good, and fast.
The PDF setting is interesting. Although the result appears like a straightforward image scan, the conversion embeds searchable text in the document – so you get the best of both worlds. It’s ideal for scanning books or magazine articles.
On to image files. We converted a 300dpi, TIFF to HTML in a matter seconds. There were just a handful of easily rectified errors. This left us confident enough to try the ultimate test – a spreadsheet from a scanned JPEG image. FineReader coped admirably. We spotted a single glitch, but the cells, columns and rows were all intact and contained the correct data.
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User Reviews
Sun, 23 May 2010Reviewed by: mcopeland7
Star Rating: 
Duration of ownership: 3 months
Strengths: Fast and accurate. It's able to perform excellent OCR on small font sizes. Used it to process an 80 page contract with almost no errors. Only hand written corrections did not scan perfectly
Weaknesses: Had a problem with the boxed software on certain documents. Downloaded upgrade which solved the problem.
Overall Evaluation: I use this product on an IMAC with an Epson Workforce 600 4 in 1 printer which has a good automatic document feeder. The combination works seamlessly and has allowed me to scan and store my important documents (small and large) and bills for archival purposes.
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