Although portable scanners are not as popular as they used to be a few years ago, there are still some companies out there that roll ouch such devices, albeit very specialized and advanced ones. And the latest announcement of this type comes from the Belgian company I.R.I.S. Group, who has just launched the IRISPen 6, a portable scanner that features an enhanced OCR engine as well as a lot of very useful and user-friendly functions.

The most important advantage provided by the IRISPen 6 is the fact that it actually replaces manual encoding work with fast and accurate scanning (like any scanner does, except for the fact that this particular device is portable). The fact of the matter is that the technical specs of the device itself are not very impressive, the secret of its advanced recognition features laying with the included software.

This, the device comes packed with several important software applications, including an advanced and highly accurate OCR engine, which allows the users to insert the printed text directly into their software applications. And since we've mentioned cheating in the title, it's worth mentioning the fact that it can be used for scanning various lecture materials and taking them along to the exam room, stored in the memory of any device with text viewing capabilities (namely, a smartphone or PDA).

Here's what Pierre De Muelenaere, President and CEO of the I.R.I.S. Group, had to say about this product: "We have already previewed the IRISPen 6 at several retail shows around the world and have seen a great interest and enthusiasm from the buyers. We are convinced that this product, with all its enhancements, will be a new hit for I.R.I.S. The new OCR engine, developed by our own R&D team, is very powerful. Retyping the text you need is only a matter of very few seconds".

The IRISPen 6 is available in 3 different versions: IRISPen Express, the entry-level version, priced at around 130 US dollars, the IRISPen Executive, which is the fully-featured high-end version (available at a MSRP of around 200 US dollars), and finally, the IRISPen Translator, a dedicated recognition and translation tool (with a price tag of around 150 US dollars).

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