Iris has produced OCR (optical character recognition) software for many years and has now combined the popular Readiris Pro 9 with a portable Iriscan scanner.

At only 28cm long and weighing just 400g, the Iriscan is certainly compact enough to be stuffed in a briefcase or drawer for instant scanning of documents.

Despite its size, it feels robust, but an instant letdown is the short USB cable, which is used to connect and power the scanner.

Without an extension cable, the Iriscan might have to be put in an awkward place if your computer's only USB slots are round the back. For notebook users this won't be such a problem.

Setting up the Iriscan device takes a matter seconds. It is compatible with both PCs and Macs and the installation wizard will guide you through the process of calibrating your scanner.

The software is also straightforward to use and has a pleasant and intuitive interface.

Readiris Pro 9 converts paper documents, pdfs and image files at up to 1,600 characters per second, which Iris claims is five times faster than any OCR available on the market.

Scanning a document and getting the Readiris software to recognise its contents is a simple task, although it takes quite a while for the scanning to be completed.

Any errors can then be edited in the captured copy on screen, after which the documents can be saved to a multitude of formats, including Word and Adobe Acrobat. There is support for Spanish, French, German and Italian as well as English.

The supplied Readiris Pro 9 did well in our tests, but unfortunately it is let down by the poor quality of the scans produced by the Iriscan device.

As well as taking its time, as previously mentioned, the standard of scans is poor when anything more complex than a black and white sheet of text with large type is scanned.

When we tried a page that was both text and graphics heavy, Iriscan struggled and the software could not extract any copy.

The scanner is satisfactory if you want to travel light and need to scan basic text files, but it will struggle with anything more complex. However, the Readiris Pro 9 software works well when dealing with clean scans.

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