The IRISPen Express is one of those products that looks pretty nifty but you're never quite sure if you're actually going to put it to good use.

Shaped like an oversized pen, you simply drag it across a line of text from a book or magazine and it will be automatically pasted into whatever document you've currently got open. What's more, it's also capable of recognising just about any font with any type of styling, although this formatting isn't reproduced in your document.

In terms of speed, the IRISPen lets you scan text in at a rate of roughly 3in per second, which isn't at all bad. Although character recognition was pretty impressive, it would struggle with the occasional letter or word, which proved to be a little frustrating.

On the whole, the IRISPen worked well, but after playing with it for some time, we began to wonder exactly who would want to spend around £100 on a product like this. Sure, it's great for scanning in small bits of text, but the thing about small bits of text is that you can manually type them in extremely quickly as well. If the price was lower, the IRISPen would be far more attractive.

Contact: Widget 0800 138 1639
www.irislink.com