The Scanmarker Air is a scanning pen made by Topscan Ltd. It attaches to a computer (either Windows or Mac) or connects to your mobile device (iOS/Android) and then, once set up with its app, can scan text and read it out loud to help dyslexic students and those with other reading difficulties.

Our Scanmarker Air features an ultra-fast processor, which inputs scanned text up to 30 times faster than manual typing. Simply glide the pen over your chosen sentence in a textbook, invoice or magazine and the pen will show the text on your computer or smartphone. This is perfect for anyone who needs to do research and save valuable time note taking. Overall, we feel the Scanmarker Air is an affordable and pretty accurate reader pen. If you don’t mind working alongside your computer or mobile device, and don’t mind needing a bit of practice, given the price we think it can represent a good value as an assistive device to students with dyslexia and other reading difficulties. One thing to be aware of that flustered some past users is that the Scanmarker Air can’t connect to two bluetooth devices at the same time. If you decide to move away from your computer to a mobile device, for example, you have to disconnect from your computer before trying to pair it to your mobile device as your mobile device won’t “see” it. Menu and Function Selection The device is equipped with 1GB of RAM which does ensure that the transition between windows (on the display) is smooth and it also makes use of 16GB of storage for both the software and the dictionary – more than enough. The way you need to use the Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 pen scanner is by making sure that the head is almost vertical (with a very slight angle) and then by pushing it, the LED should light up and the scanned words should appear on the display. One issue we had, that relates to the Scanmarker Air not being a stand alone device, is that you’ll need an internet connection to use some features. For example, you’ll need to be connected to the net anytime you connect for the first time to a device, to activate the Scanmarker, and even for its translation ability.While these days it’s not all that common to not be around a wifi connection or be in range of 4/5g (especially as a student) this is something to be aware of that has caught some users off guard. Because we found it to be a little more sensitive to non-smooth hand movements and because it took some practice before we started seeing really good accuracy, we would probably only recommend this product to students 10 and up. The Scanmarker Air does take some practice to get working accurately. Compared to more expensive devices it seems a little more sensitive to jittering, which can cause it to not read text properly.

If they can do those things, they should be able to use a Scanmaker Air without much issue. Conclusion While the voice reading was somewhat old school and not as natural as other options, the device’s voice was clear and read out the text pretty well. At a minimum, for desktops and laptop computers, it needs a system running Windows 7 (or higher) and Mac OSX 10 (or higher), so it will run on many older systems. The Scanmarker Air will read font sizes between 6 and 24 point. This is a pretty wide range of fonts and fairly useful since almost all adult (that usually use size 8-12 fonts) and children’s books (that typically use size 14-16 fonts) will fit inside the scanning area. Note: As a fun fact, a similar approach to that of a pen scanner has been implemented into some smartglasses (and smartphones, in the form of an app), which should allow its users to either film or take photos of various documents and then later, simply port the text into a digital format.

Which Scanmarker model is right for you?

The pen scanner is one of the best modern pieces of technology that is able to scan an image, machine printed or handwritten text and, by taking advantage of the Optical Character Recognition technology (OCR), it can convert the scanned data into machine encoded text, therefore making it available for easy editing (the data can be immediately loaded in a text editor), automatic translation to another language, text-to-speech applications (useful for visually impaired and blind users, as well as for people that suffer from dyslexia – it is also a key element for A.I. development) and overall for a better preservation of the data (such as old books, which would require significant more time and work to survive the passage of time). ULTRA-FAST SCANNING: the Scanmarker Air enters text 30 times faster than typing, saving you valuable note taking time