C-Pen Handheld Scanner

Wouldn't it be nice to scan text from genealogy books or papers directly into your computer? The next time you visit a library, a courthouse, or a genealogy society, you might want to scan your new findings directly instead of making photocopies or manually transcribing everything. In the case of handwritten documents, a scanned image of the original document could help to create the best source citation of all.

It may not be practical to carry a standard flatbed computer scanner on your next trip. The scanners that you purchase at local computer stores also may not be suitable for scanning information found in bound volumes, especially those oversized ledger books that we deal with so often in genealogy research. The C-Pen may be the solution you are looking for.

This device looks like an oversized pen with a cable protruding that plugs into your computer's USB port. To use it in a library or archive, you will need a Windows laptop computer. There are no batteries involved because this scanner obtains its power directly from the USB connection. It scans one line of information at a time. You manually move the device across a document, and an image of that line is transferred to your computer. You then pause briefly at the end of the line before going to the next line and scanning that one as well. Over and over, you move down the page one line at a time, scanning as much information as you wish.

The C-Pen 20 scans text, numbers, and small images from printed or hand-written sources. The data is sent line-by-line into your Windows computer. It should work especially well with any laptop computer.

This small device is easy to use. You can open your favorite genealogy program, word processor, or most any other program that accepts text and image input, and then find the individual's record that you seek. You simply move the cursor to the point where you wish to enter text and then start scanning. Scanning text is similar to using a highlighter: you sweep the C-Pen from left to right at moderate speed. The text from the page instantly appears wherever the cursor on your screen is located, so you can use this device with just about any Windows program, including Word, Excel, or your favorite genealogy program. If the data you scan is typeset information, the included OCR software converts it to text. Handwritten information is maintained as an image

The C-Pen's manufacturer claims that the overall speed of scanning is higher with the C-Pen 20 than that of a desktop scanner. In contrast, scanning with a desktop scanner is a time consuming process that includes loading the page, scanning, interpreting data, and finally transferring it into your application. C-Pen 20 allows you to immediately scan the text segment into the application you need, inserting it at the cursor's point. However, I would suggest that scanning multiple pages of information, one line at a time, will still be a tedious process. The C-Pen 20 excels at situations where you need only a few paragraphs.

The C-Pen 20 obviously is useful for genealogy purposes, but it has many other uses as well. It will scan business cards, columns of numbers, and much, much more.  While the C-Pen 20 will not damage the binding of a book as much as most flatbed scanners, it still will produce a bit of wear on the page. I would never use it on delicate materials of any sort. It also will not scan material published on microfilm or microfiche.

The C-Pen 20 is compatible with Windows 98, 98se, ME, 2000 or XP. The handheld scanner is not limited to scanning English documents. It also works with Armenian (Eastern, Western, Grabar), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch (The Netherlands and Belgium), Estonian, Finnish, French, German (new and old spelling), Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Nynorsk and Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tatar, Turkish and Ukrainian. Whew!

The C-Pen 20 has a "street price" in the United States of about $140 and about £85 in the U.K. Many merchants may discount that price. It is available online from the company's web site at http://www.cpenusa.com, rootsbooks.com, and from many other online and traditional computer stores.

Comments

[Tom Hudson]

To minimize or eliminate wear on scanned sheets carry several sheets of thin transparent plastic sized for the various documents you might encounter.

[Phyllis Doucette]

I used the C-Pen very successfully on a trip to Holland, translating Dutch to English and also French to English while researching on Prince Edward Island. I suggest that anyone planning to use the C-Pen practise on many documents before leaving home. There is a definite learning curve to moving the C-Pen smoothly and positioning it properly on the lines. For copies that don't need translation, I prefer the R-700 Docupen from Planon. It is much faster and stores about 100 pages before needing to be downloaded to the laptop. Again, it needed some practise, but the lights signal when you have wavered and didn't get a good scan. While both are fairly expensive gadgets, they can easily save an extra research trip. At least that's how I justify the cost!

[Gordon Banks]

I use a pocket digital camera with macro focusing ability. It is much quicker and also will work at microfilm readers, which a scanner won't. And it will store a lot more than 100 pages.

[dale]

Plus a digital camera will capture an entire image in 1 shot. Thus a land entry in a deed book, or a census page is much simpler with a digital camera. I haven't tried to put a jpeg file of a typed page through character recognition software but it should work relatievely well. My olympus camera captures 8 megapixils, has macro capacity, and can also directly download to my laptop with USB 2 speed.

The trick with a camera is to use a tripod, keep the image to be photographed as flat as possible, and to use a black and white mode to capture the image contrast as much as possible. Flash photography is usually ok but if not having the immage evenly lite is helpful for delicate documents.

[Sharon Meeker]

This discussion makes me happy that my 6-year-old Hewlett-Packard CapShare 920 is still purring along. The CapShare was discontinued about a year after I bought it and I'm always nervous that something terrible will happen to it. It will scan about 50-75 pages until it needs unloading -- either into my laptop or directly to my Canon portable printer (using infrared). It works great on trips, no power or wires required. It scans about a 5 inch swath at a time, and "stitches" parts of the page together all by itself -- I just need to overlap scanning passes a little bit. It does very well with handwritten documents at the courthouse. Takes probably 10 seconds per page. Usually I can scan them while they are still in the bound books. I've been hoping somebody would come up with something similar in case mine ever fails. In the meantime, I've got my fingers crossed!

[Charles Lockwood]

I have been researching my family for years. I have found a very easy way of recording information from books and manuscripts, and saves the costs of Xeroxing at the Library copy machine. I take my digital camera and when I find something that I want a copy of for my records I simply take a picture of the page(s) along with copies of the front and spine of the book. If necessary I copy the front page of the book. This way I have the information along with it's source. I can then download this into my computer later and have a permanent copy on file. No more standing in line and feeding coins into the copy machine.

[Melissa]

Wow, I never thought of using my digital camera to take pictures of documents at the library instead of using the copier. Thanks for the idea. I see also from the C-Pen website that it is compatible with handheld devices. That will come in handy since I will be traveling to the UK to do research this coming summer and may run into documents in languages other than English. But, I don't see Latin listed. Too bad. It's my understanding that one can run into documents that were created at the churches hundreds of years ago, and written in Latin. I'll have to brush up on my Latin for those documents, I guess.

[Pat]

Is there any way to use a Pocket PC PDA to use either the scanner or something else that would capture the images and store in the PDA?

[Veniece Lovell]

This C-Pen Handheld Scanner would be more appealing if the price tag was also.

[Dutch-one]

Taking pictures of a text is very useful if you only want to have an image. When you want to use the text it's not enough, then you have to OCR. The C-pen offers an instant OCR so the text is recognized and put into your document or file. This is very nice when you want to quote paragraphs or difficult names or numbers.
I find the C-Pen-20 a very good device because it's very simple to install, works well, can be used left and right handed and is easier and more accurate then the IRISpen Express.