PenPower WorldPenScan Wi-Fi | OCR Pen Scanner | Reading Mode

I am a full-time college student and this is so nice to have!! There are so many things that I would rather listen to than read, and this makes that a lot easier. I am very impressed with how well it works too!

I’m actually stunned that this works and how well it works. It was pretty simple to setup and use. Its scans pretty accurately. Great for students and copying study material into notes.

My daughter is learning Japanese in school – trying to read texts can be difficult because of the characters. It actually takes a lot of knowledge to even try to look one up in a Japanese dictionary. Being able to scan it to look up in an electronic dictionary is a great advantage. The scanner was able to copy Japanese text from books and had no problem recognizing it from right-to-left or top-to-bottom (though it outputs in right-to-left either way). It never missed a single character, got one wrong, or missed any punctuation, etc. It’s actually quite amazing how accurate it is. It’s very easy to scan with – you just push down, a light comes on, and you drag. When you lift it, it knows you’re done and sends the text.

Once the scanner is done is where you have a bit of a problem – the software, or more correctly the lack of software, is a bit of a pain. It uses a webapp for everything. In theory, that’s nice, since you can output it to anywhere – a phone, a tablet, a computer, etc – you don’t need to install proprietary software. The problem is, if they ever go out of business, you’re left with a paperweight. You also have to have an internet connection to use it, so that eliminates some of the useful scenarios.

The other problem with the webapp, besides being a webapp, is that it is clearly designed for people learning English as a second language. There are several language dictionaries installed, but they only work one way – English to other. However, the app lets you choose the other way. For example, I can set it to translate from Japanese to English, but when you input text, it doesn’t do anything – it just outputs the Japanese you put in. If this was being sold in China (which I’m sure it is), that’s fine. But if you’re going to sell it in the US, you should expect most of your users will being going from some language to English, not the other way around.

It does have a one-button copy feature, so I just copy the text and swap over to the Google translate app. It gets the job done, but it takes a couple of unnecessary steps.

The pen itself is well-built and has a very bright screen – so bright, in fact, I had to turn it down so my phone camera could scan the QR code to get to the webapp (it generates a unique URL for each pen). It would have been nice to include a case, though it does have a cap for the sensor end so at least the most sensitive parts are protected.

I really want to give this a 3.5 stars, but Amazon only let’s you do whole. Since it works amazingly well as a scanner, I guess I lean towards 4 stars. If the company goes out of business, though, it will quickly go to 0 stars. I’m not sure how different the standalone version is; if it’s as accurate as this one without the webapp weakness, it might be a better way to go. That said, this does work well out of the box, and again, I can’t overemphasize how great, fast, and accurate the scanning is. They really nailed that part.

Overall, it’s a neat pen that could be made a little better with some tweaks to the software, but works well enough as-is to recommend.

i have this scanner pen for a week and use it regularly. it reads aloud/mute or save to a text file after scan. i purchased this scanner for education. it works very well with ChatGPT.