Last week I posted a brief coverage on the Nokia Multiscanner version extracted from E-series to be used with other s60 3rd edition phones( Actually this is the same version that is available in E66 and E71 ).At the time of my post I didn’t have enough time to play with it, as I posted it as soon as I got it.So if you can remember I mentioned that the Text reader application isn’t giving out accurate results and I’d rather prefer to stick on to the ABBY BCR,even for the Business card reading,but after using the Multiscanner in the following days I was convinced that my quick impression on this little application wasn’t quite right. Actually the truth is, during the last few days I used it it turned out to be the best optical reading application I’ve ever used,and my N95 8GB made its way to the top eyeopener among my friends and cousins,as it did with the Barcode reader and the ABBY reader. The misleading point for my decision in the last report was a simply,but the turning point for the application which can be found in the settings menu. To make it easy to understand I thought of write a complete walkthrough review of the application.
First lets take a look at the Card reader application,even with the default settings it does come up with satisfactorily good Optical character reading capabilities,most of the time you’ll get accurate text output. The only problem you’ll face is when there are logos and other symbols in the card it might tend to read them mistakenly for text. So for this and false output results of the Text Reader that I mentioned in my last post, the solution is there in the settings menu, all you have to do is set the “Layout Adjusting” option on.
What does this do?, you won’t notice the huge difference it makes until you capture a snapshot of a text field or a Business card. But when you start using the application with “Layout Adjusting” on,as soon after you scan something, you’ll be prompted into a snapshot of the text field and on top of it a dotted box marquee with three circles (Vertices),two at the edges opposite to each other and the other one in the middle, by dragging the ones at the edges you can scale and with the middle one you can move the box selecting the text area to be recognized,making it easier to the application to read only the required field. See how it recognize the text areas in Cards and allows us to edit the area accordingly,
check out the above screenshots to see clearly the amount of maneuverability offered in Layout Adjusting.
And the Results of the 2 Business cards I tried to read are shown below,The original card and the extracted data respectively,
Card 1 :
Card 2 :
The reading capabilities are amazing and they can be added to the contacts in an instance. The best thing that you get with the “Layout Adjusting” is that you can even read the letters in logos as demonstrated above.
And now the Text Reader,same procedure applies and the yielded result can be saved as a note or either sent as a message.See the screenshots below of an article I scanned and tested.
Original Document :
Result, Without the “Layout adjusting “ on,Some characters aren’t pick correctly.
Result, With the “Layout Adjusting” on.
See how it extracts the text as it is,
Think everything is pretty clear with the above illustrations, and hope the scanner in you pocket may get busy, So please give your feedback in the comments regarding this application (especially from E-series users) and have an interesting weekend.