Scanmarker Air Reading Pen & Pen Scanner | Translator Pen for Dyslexia, Students & Professionals - Compatible with Mac, Windows, iOS & Android

Got it for my son with learning disabilities especially reading. He’s been using it for 5 months now and it’s been a blessing.

I have to read a lot of books for my Doctoral program. For those I don’t have digitally, I needed a way to get the excerpts I wanted to save into my computer and the thought of typing them out is literally repulsive to me. So usually I read through and mark the spot I wanted to highlight, and when I’m done, I’ll go back through with this tool and capture the highlights into something like Zotero or Obsidian.It’s been a game changer.

Overall, the Scanmarker Air has worked very well for my purpose: scanning lines of text rather than taking hand written notes from books.Originally, I was *extremely* frustrated with the Scanmarker Air though, because it would invariably not scan straight or not be smooth enough. What I learned is that the use of the included plastic "guide" is vital, and it doesn't necessarily need to touch the paper to scan properly. Since I began using the guide regularly, the Scanmarker Air has only very seldom not been able to properly pick up the lines of text. However, that does come with a bit of a caviat. If your source has successive lines of text placed close together, the device's width might accidentally pick up multiple lines of text even with use of the plastic guide. I've had this happen on a couple occasions.Overall, this is a really nice device. Much nicer than I originally thought it was before I finally did something smart and used the plastic guide. I've never had a problem with it refusing to connect. Although, sometimes I do wish the battery life was better. Depending on how much you're scanning, you may find it easier to have the device continuously connected to a charger.

I bought this product specifically to scan Japanese text and translate to English. I already knew from experience with other devices that most have a problem with translating Japanese to English for some reason but I thought this one would be different based on the reviews I read here on Amazon. I figured as long as this Scanmarker Air didn't use Google Translate there was hope that it might give a good translation. That hope was short-lived as I removed the product from the shipping package and the first thing I spotted on the back of the box was the Google Translate icon. I immediately assumed I spent over $100 on another "Google Play Store app wrapped in plastic". Still, I had to go through the motions just to confirm my fears...After a couple hours practicing just holding the scanner (I was about to trash the device just because it kept telling me my scan attempts were not smooth, too slow, etc.) I thought I finally got the hang of it. I was scanning English text from books, research papers, etc. for practice and it worked fine in that regard. It worked great scanning English from books to MS Word, Excel, etc.My next test was trying to scan regular horizontal Japanese text and translate to English. I tested on a few book titles, paragraph sentences, both single words and single line of text. Both tests failed. I got nothing but garbled gibberish... I tested some of my vertical text Japanese books and in this test I got gibberish + odd symbols. I tried horizontal Japanese text from a document published this year but instead of translating, I just scanned the Japanese text it produced to Word then copy/pasted the scanned text into other online translation apps (Yes, Google Translate too) and got the same results... gibberish that made no sense what-so-ever.I don't know if this product bases its translations from the Google Translate database but when will someone on this earth come up with a half-descent Japanese to English translator? Until there is an answer to this question, I will just have to continue relying on my poor wife (who's Japanese) to translate Japanese for me until I become fluent. It is not a total loss, I am a researcher and so I think I may still hold on to this product for note scanning (from English text) however, I would NOT recommend this product to anyone that hopes to use this to translate lines for Japanese text (horizontal and vertical) from literature.

This is a pretty good product, and surprisingly well to a degree. The software itself is relatively intuitive, and the accuracy really depends on the language. So this is the good of the pen, and worth bringing up first. The Text scan (straight up OCR) is pretty good, the scan mode (as if you want to scan without the OCR) is pretty awful. That's pretty universal. Still, you technically can attempt to scan something as a picture and throw it into word..The problem is it really depends on who you are, and what you're using it for. If you're mostly going to scan English-like languages. I'm defining that as languages that use mostly English-like characters, it'll probably perform really well. I'm studying Japanese, though, and this is where it has a lot of problems.In general, if you're scanning straight up Japanese (no furagana), then you're going to get about 80% or so accuracy rate. It has a lot of problems with stuff like っつ、where it can't tell the difference between a small tsu and a larger one. Means you'll likely spend a lot of time correcting. Even worse, if you try to scan vertical text, it won't work well. I tried to find this in the settings, as I'd expect them to account for that, but couldn't find it anywhere. If someone else found it, I'd appreciate learning where it's at. Even worse, and this is probably the worst part of the device, is that it is absolutely horrid on furagana-laced text. Pretty much unusable in those situations.I have mixed feelings about the device and the usability of it. If I'm going to pull a lot of information from a book and throw it into Anki/etc, I'd likely first start by using a flatbed scanner, scanning the whole thing, then running it through FineReader to pull out the text that way. This can be very time consuming. My hope, when purchasing this, was that I can snip specific words out of a text, add them quickly into Anki, and go on with my life. I may still be able to do this some, but it won't be nearly as fast as English.Which goes back to English. If you're using mostly English-like languages, you're likely to get an accuracy of over 90%. I tried a variety of different things to scan and here's roughly what I found (<CR> Denotes carriage return. Format is: <Exactly what's said> => <What scanner gives>):1) Japanese with Hiragana - Hiragana Times/etc (Took 2 scans, took the better of the two) - 公園だけでなく、。。 => #園だけでなく <CR><CR> てつズA.2) Japanese without Hiragana - Read Real Japanese (Took 4 scans, took the better of the 4) - その腕をわたしの肩にまわし => その腕をわたしの勵こまね 一3) Japanese Manga - vertical text test (Took 2 scans) - ずっと伝えたかった => 1っと^龙たかった** I also tried other mangas, and none worked well, maybe 15% accuracy, at best.4) Chinese book I have. I can't read chinese, so here's just a straight output of 1 scan. I did compare it to the original, and do calligraphy so I can tell subtle differences in characters, and it got one kinda okay, but none right: 是武氣的主要务钟5) English - R in action (technical book. Took 1 scan) - When you're creating a package, it's a good idea to include one or more datasets that => vVhen you re creating a package, it's a good idea to include one or more datasets thatAs you can tell from the above. It's marginally okay with some Japanese, but requires a lot of corrections and you can't have furagana. Furthermore, the vertical writing recognition is really quite awful. Chinese is equally as bad. With English, it's at least marginally okay.To the developers of the product: I think you're on to something with this pen. I do like the concept, and I do like how well it works. Accuracy needs to be improved on English some, but Japanese support needs a boatload of work. Honestly, I'm fine with helping with some of this. I think it's a worthwhile product, and definitely would like to see Japanese better supported in this.