Freaky, glossy, nonstandard business cards don’t work in it, either. Of course, this machine doesn’t recognize the text of handwritten, faded or very shiny receipts. (You have to type in other stores’ names manually.) The Scanalizer’s recognition accuracy is extremely good the scanner even recognizes the logos of hundreds of stores like Staples and Home Depot so you don’t have to type their names into the database. The other is throwing the receipts away afterward. One is watching it munch down your receipts and tally their totals on the screen. There are two deeply satisfying phases to this machine.
#The neat receipt pdf#
You can send a formattedĮxpense report to your boss for reimbursement, or spit out a PDF of your tax-related receipts for the Internal Revenue Service, which accepts scanned receipts. You can sync the business-card database with Outlook, or export it to any other address-book program. With a couple clicks, you can export the scanned information in every conceivable format. In other words, the Scanalizer does do O.C.R. The text, and add its contents-name, date, amount, and so on-to a searchable database. It takes about 15 seconds to slurp in receipt, recognize It’s designed principally for scanning receipts, either for tax or business purposes.
That doesn’t mean this machine isn’t awesome, though. Second, it doesn’t convert regular documents into text it just stores them It’s not actually a pen scanner you feed paper into its rollers sheet by sheet, so it can’t scan books or magazines. I didn’t include it in the roundup, though, for two reasons. The Neat Receipts Scanalizer ($168) is portable, all right-it’s about the length of a travel umbrella, but weighs only 11 ounces. I reviewed tiny pen scanners: portable, pen-shaped scanners that, when swiped across printed documents, convert them into editable, typed text using optical character recognition (O.C.R.). My column in today’s paper was missing a great product, too-for a very different reason. If I hadn’t missed it in my original roundup-dang it!-the Odyssey would have won the derby. But if the ruggedness and convenience of a cartridge system appeals to you, there’s no less expensive, more convenient backup/full-hard-drive Now, even Odyssey cartridges cost more than standalone pocket drives. Just this month, for example, Imation addedġ60-gigabyte Odyssey cartridges to its catalog. Like the Quantum and RDX drives (but unlike the Iomega Rev), the Odyssey drive is just a shell you won’t have to replace it as cartridge-capacity technology improves. The Odyssey cartridgesĬan save you a heck of a lot of money over time. The comparable RDX cartridges cost $118 and $270-that’s 22 to 30 percent more. The cartridge prices are also far better: 40 gigabytes for $91, for example, or 120 gigabytes for $188. The Odyssey drive itself costs $185 with a starter cartridge-already an enormous savings over the $300 to $500 pricing of its rivals. One is compatibility with Macs as well as PCs the other is price. That withstands three-foot drops to concrete-but adds two more. It offers the same virtues as the Quantum and RDX drives-including shockproofing What I didn’t realize was that there’s a fourth removable-drive cartridge system, called the Imation Odyssey (). That’s nearly triple the cost of a self-contained pocket hard drive. A 120-gigabyte Quantum cartridge, for example, costs $250. The downside, I noted, is the nosebleed pricing of the cartridges. (They blow slow, expensive, fussy tape-backup systems completely out of the water.) How else are you supposed to back up the 320-gigabyte hard drives that come in new computers? Burn them onto 68 DVDs? No, you need something fast, rugged, expandable and reliable-like That manufacture cartridges in a format called RDX).
I tested drives from Quantum, Iomega and Dell (which is one of several companies In this e-column, I want to spotlight two products that didn’t make it into recent roundups-for different reasons.Ī few weeks ago, I reviewed removable-cartridge hard-drive systems. I’ve ached for a single, giant database of every tech product from every tech company with every PR phone number!) I query Google, I query the PR people, and I still sometimes miss a product that ought to have been reviewed. Winds up shocked to find that the resulting column also reviews its rivals-some of which may be better than the originally proposed product.Īnyway, finding and ordering all of the contenders in a field can be a tricky business. Many a PR person pitching me on some new gadget probably My efforts to uphold the second instruction helps explain why so many of my columns are roundups: all of the waterproof cameras, say, or all of the MP3 toothbrushes. “Tell us whether or not to buy the thing,” he said, “and
My very first Times editor, seven years ago, gave me only two specific instructions on the weekly tech-review column I was about to begin writing.
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