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| Dane-Elec Digital Pen | 
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| Brand: Dane-Elec
Category: CE
List Price: $109.99
Buy New: $87.79
You Save: $22.20 (20%)
New (24) from $87.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Color: Silver
Media: Electronics
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.7 x 1.9
MPN: DA-DP1-01GC5-R
Model: DA-DP1-01GC5-R
UPC: 804272722956
EAN: 0804272722956
ASIN: B0013JHJWE
Promotion: Terms and Conditions
Promotion: Terms and Conditions
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 9 | | NEXT » |
 great for a day September 11, 2008
Delighted with the pen for a second then everything refused to work. Hopefully it was just a faulty product going to try it again
Doesn't Work August 26, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Every once in a while it will clearly produce a few digitalized words. But 95 percent of what it produces are random lines and marks. It is a piece of junk. Wait for someone to perfect a similar product before you plunk down your hard-earned dollars.
 Sortta cool, but Finicky August 24, 2008
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Practically speaking, this is a one or two star product. I gave them 3 stars because it is a product in a quite new market with a reasonable price. If you think it's a cool toy, buy it. If you need it to do serious work next week, don't buy it.
Here's the quick summary:
BOTTOM LINE:
The product is basically good, but the tendency of the receiver to drop information is a fatal flaw to practical use. The conditions under which information gets lost are detailed below.
PRO:
Good feature set. Good price point. Comes with lots of nice software stored conveniently on the receiver/flash drive. Writes on any paper. Uses common ink cartridges (and batteries, sort of - see below). MyScript notes software does surprisingly well at handwriting-to-text conversion.
CON:
Receiver is finicky; it can drop entire recording sessions, or parts of a page, even though the activity LED is flashing correctly. Top 20% of page is usually not recorded at all. Page turning is cumbersome. Careful placement of the receiver is important. Pen component is cheaply made. No off switch (so you need to remove batteries to save power). Resolution can be poor, especially near the bottom of a page. Limited number of output formats, and saved PDFs are not efficient (they are bigger than equivalent SVG files containing the pen lines).
In more detail:
I was pleased that the pen and software were easy to set up and use. I was also pleased that the pen viewer supports Linux and Mac, that MyScript Notes software was easy to register, and that MyScript works nicely, and sufficiently quickly, in VMWare Fusion Windows running on my first gen MacBook Pro. I was also pleased that the pen does what it says it does: it digitized my first few handwriting samples. Yay!
I was not pleased with the pen itself. I am sort of a pen snob, and usually write with a Namiki fountain pen. This pen feels like cheap plastic junk, and writes like the free ballpoints you get at conventions. To be fair, my Namiki and the zPen have about the same price, and the Namiki doesn't do any digital tricks (but oh man does it ever write nice!). One nice thing about the pen is that it takes common refills of the sort used by most multifunction pens, and some of these are pretty nice for ball points. Pilot PhD Multi refills and Fischer pressurized "universal" refills both fit, and write better than the included refill.
As a previous reviewer mentioned, there is no off switch on the pen, and so once you take out the little plastic isolator, it may drain your watch batteries in a hurry. This is annoying, but not fatal, since you can pull one of the batteries out and store it in the receiver cap to save power. Also, although I was not able to find the included GP393 batteries in my local store, I found that size 13 "zinc/air" hearing aid batteries fit, and work, just fine. I got an 8-pack of these at my local CVS pharmacy for $6. I live Bozeman MT (USA), which is certainly no shopping paradise, so when I can find what I need at the drug store across the street, I call that "easy to find". The receiver has an onboard rechargeable battery that charges via USB. Annoyingly, it will only charge when connected to a computer, so you can't use an AC->USB adapter (for example the Palm, Griffin, or Apple models) to charge it.
I tested the pen in a number of configurations. I quickly found out that there is a very large "dead zone" near the receiver. The manual says that within 1 inch of the receiver signal quality may be poor. I beg to differ. Within 4 inches of the receiver, signal quality may be entirely absent. I tried drawing a grid of lines on many types of paper, and almost every time the digitized result had a 3"-4" hemi-circle of missing lines centered on the receiver. I got my best results using an A5 notebook, and rather than clipping the receiver to the book, I just set it about 3 inches above the top of the page, at the same horizontal level (stacking it on top of my iPod touch worked well :). When writing this way, though, be careful not to move the notebook!
I did my best to have very careful handwriting, but I shouldn't have tried so hard. The resolution of the digitizer is not that great, and it gets worse farther from the receiver. By the bottom line of my notebook, my digital text looks like it was written by a guy with Parkinson's disease, even though the ink text looks fine. In the end I decided that, on an 8.5x11 college ruled pad (with the receiver set at the top of the pad), I could start writing 3.5" from the top, stop writing 2" from the bottom, and the intervening text digitized OK. Be careful that the receiver is oriented in exactly the same horizontal plane as your paper, or it won't work.
Well, except when it didn't record at all. I have had half a dozen experiences where I turn the receiver on, it flashes, then becomes steady as normal, I write, and the "pen down" LED turns on and off as normal, and then when I plug the receiver into the computer, there is a blank note file, and all my writing is lost.
Changing pages requires compressing the spring clip on the receiver. This seems to work OK, but you have to remember to do it, even though you can't have actually clipped the receiver to your paper if you expect the digitizer to work.
Be careful of your hand posture. If you grip too low, curl your hand around, or put your weak hand above the pen, it will block the digitizer.
Basically, all these constraints make the process of hand-writing a lot less pretty, and I feel like I should just type. There is, however, one redeeming merit: MyScript Notes. I hate Windows-only software on principal, and I don't tend to like non-open-source ware either. Despite this, I think MyScript is a fine program. It isn't perfect, especially if you have small writing, sloppy writing, writing with an unusual stroke sequence, or too little separation between words. However, if you write carefully, it can be 95% accurate in converting cursive script to digital text. That's a hard problem, and having usable accuracy at it is a major achievement. Kudos to MyScript.
Note that MyScript does care about the order of pen strokes. I can get a nice SVG file by tracing (e.g. with Illustrator or InkScape) a scan of a page, but this can't be recognized. For one thing, the SVG format MyScript understands is the Anoto format, and tracing with InkScape doesn't generate compliant SVG, but even if you convert it, without the correct stroke order, recognition doesn't work.
Anyway, I've now written a few dozen pages of fiction with the zPen, and put them in my computer. I can definitely go faster by writing normal ink with my Namiki and transcribing later with my keyboard, but it was a cool experience to see my writing turn into ascii automatically, hence the 3 stars.
I haven't tested an Anoto technology pen (eg the LiveScribe Pulse), but I bet they are much more reliable and accurate. If you really need the thing to work on demand, I'd try that solution, and just live with buying special paper. Alternately, go old school and use real live ink. If you do that, I suggest unlined Moleskin softcover notebooks and a Namiki Vanishing Point fountain pen running J Herbin ink. There's nothing in the digital wold that compares. Oh, and when you transcribe, use a dvorak layout keyboard :)
 Great technology August 11, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I've been wanting a pen that does this for a while now, and decided that I would take a chance on this one after seeing some videos of it on Youtube. I can tell you now that it works just as it claims to as far as capturing your handwriting just as you write it. The clip is big and can grip many sheets of paper, which is something that is a problem with other similar pens of different brands.
One problem everyone has with these types of pens (Dane-Elec and every other), is the handwriting recognition barely works. However this isn't the fault of Dane-Elec, as they didn't develop the software. In fact every digital pen comes with the same software. Handwriting recognition software is just one of those technologies that will never be as great as promised, you could wait a hundred years and buy a digital pen and the handwriting recognition would still suck. I gave this product 5 stars because I wasn't even planning on using that feature anyway.
As long as you aren't relying on that handwriting recognition, this pen should be a great addition to your office/school notetaking armory.
ZPen: it works August 10, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
The product does everything it claims it does. The major test is conversion accuracy. Even without training it was quite remarkable. The training makes it almost perfect. Can someone explain to me why this company's stock did not soar after releasing this gem?
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