Peter Svensson at TechNewsWorld has done a review of some of the digital pens on the market and concludes that the LiveScribe Pulse is the best. "Electronic pens can be used to make your handwritten notes available on a computer. They usually work fine if you just want to save an image of what you've scribbled; however, making them recognize your handwriting and turn it into text is more difficult." He goes on to say that "There is probably no better gadget for taking notes in class, except perhaps a Tablet PC, which allows you to write on the screen. However, Tablet PCs are expensive and more difficult to use."
I would tend to agree with the gist of this article with the exception of the tablet PC being more difficult to use and the LiveScribe Pulse being the best solution. Digital pens are very good at capturing ink. They are like an ink recorder in that they capture your ink strokes and redisplay them on your computer. They are ideally suited for capturing notes and transferring those notes to another application such as Microsoft's Journal or OneNote. However, if you want to capture your ink and save it into another application, then things start to get more complicated.
The reason for this complication is that most computer applications don't like ink. They want information to be stored in a digital text format. Therefore, once you transfer your ink to your computer, you're going to have to convert the ink to text and this is going to require a handwriting recognizer. These come standard on tablet PCs or PCs running Windows Vista but aren't standard on PCs running Windows XP.
The second issue is how to re-align the captured ink from within a software application. These digital pens store their ink in their own proprietary format and the software must be smart enough to know how to reposition the ink from within their application. Since most applications don't recognize ink, they don't know what to do with it and just ignore it.
The third issue is some of these pens require you to use special paper and there aren't that many places were you can buy this paper. They come in 4 pack notebooks of 100 sheets and are priced at $20 per 4 pack.
In summary, Active Ink Software (http://www.activeinksoftware.com) has done a lot of research and testing with digital pens and tablets and has found the tablet PC still to be the best solution for data capture. However, digital pen capturing devices are a low cost alternative and the one we find to be the best solution is the Adesso CyberPad. It doesn't require any special paper, it has a clipboard for holding your paper and works fairly well with our own electronic form capturing solution.
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