ScanSoft OmniPage 15 [OLD VERSION]

As a computer scientist of 15+ years, I've seen my share of buggy code, frustrating application GUIs and useless technical support. But I must say that Scansoft's Omnipage far exceeds even the worst apps I've ever used (and I have used a lot). I'm able to crash the application in several ways- all repeatable. Some of the problems are more random but they all involve crashes or hangs that end up loosing whatever you were working on. I've submitted several of these bugs to their technical support- for which I have the pleasure of paying them $19.95 "per incident". Most of their responses involve "it works for me" or some type of unacceptable work around which no human being should ever have to subject themselves. They have yet to address the problem head on. It's amazing to me that such a bad product has a significant market share - is this market too small to attract more competitors? It certainly doesn't seem like it would be very hard to provide a better product than this. The only free support they use to provide was a message board where customers could post problems and try to help each other. They now no longer let anyone register to post on these boards- probably because everyone was writing about how bad the product and company support are... I highly recommend you try any other package than this before going with Omnipage. This should only be a last resort- and then you must prepare yourself for the frustration, anger and disappointment. BTW- If you must use this product, avoid the "proof reader" tool at all costs. Many of the crashes and problems come from this tool (but not all). Good luck. Bryan Michael

I had expected this version to handle pdf files. It does not - you must buy the pro version. The OCR function does work well though.

Save your money. XP has an inbuilt OCR that works as well or better. Thank you.

I have just purchased this upgrade, so the following comments should be viewed as preliminary. Still, some information is better than none. Having used OmniPage since its beginning, I have been irritated by the company's practice of releasing software before it has driven the bugs out. That does not appear to be a problem in this case. The software loaded cleanly and came up and works properly. As one would expect after 15 shots at it, character recognition is generally excellent. The big advance is in speed of operation. Compared to ver. 14, this version flies, which will probably be the improvement of greatest interest to users. The interface remains non-user-friendly. New users will go crazy trying to figure out how to use it, but once you do, it's worth it.

I'm going through my orders and writing reviews for everything I neglected to review when I got it. I remember that I was extremely pleased with this program. It was easy to use and made my work much easier.

I purchased this product two weeks ago to convert some PDF files to searchable format. When I could get the OCR to start it did a good job of converting the text. The interface was difficult to use, and in about 20% of the runs the application would hang before beginning the conversion. When I attempted to use set up batch scans the system crashed while I was configuring it in 100% of the runs. I would have reported the problem to technical support, but the publisher charges per incident. To be fair they do offer to wave the charge for the first incident, but since the program crashed in the first five minutes of use it seemed like I would be contacting support more than once. I finally took advantage of the 30-day money back guarantee (I'd highly recommend checking that this applies if you're thinking about buying the program) and purchased Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 instead.

Having been the sole IT hardware person for over 14 years [at my current location. In IT hardware/software for over 20 years career-wise]. I have personally owned over 5 scanners, many in the under $200 range. I have installed/setup/tested/used over 30 scanners and their associated software packages. (and worked with separately purchased retail boxes of omnipage OCR software). The majority of OCR packages I have installed were OMNIPAGE. I have also worked with READIRIS, ABBYY and some that are no longer in business. Omnipage was always a middle-of-the-road performer for me. Regardless of the version. In my work environment,I worked with higher priced scanners. So the price range of scanners I have tested is quite broad. The only program that ever really blew me away was ABBYY FINE READER. I have used their basic sprint reader, up through the Fine reader. With Scansoft it seemed to be a 50/50 or 60/40 split. Half your time scanning and then half your time "Reviewing" those items that Omnipage could NOT decypher. Nothing is so aggravating as a program that throws it's arms up in the air and says,"Hey Mr/Ms user. I can't determine what this text is. Please decypher it for me and type in the correct word(s). I mean heck, the whole concept here is that the software should do the DECODING. As others have noted, support is costly. For a refreshing OCR program, go get a copy of ABBYY Finereader. I am still using version 5, mostly because I don't currently do enough OCR'ing to justify buying a current version. NOTE: Last time I checked with ABBYY, you can QUALIFY for their upgrade pricing by either: 1. switching from one of their competitor's to ABBYY. 2. Upgrading one of your older versions of ABBYY. They (ABBYY) did not care what competitor version I was upgrading from. I could have upgraded from Omnipage 8 or 9, and still got the same good pricing deal as someone upgrading from [example] omnipage 14. ABBYY is quite liberal in that regard. [Sidenote: Too many places these days have changed their upgrade polcy. Many will not offer upgrade pricing unless it was from the very last version of their software.] I'm not a big fan of Readiris, but I would buy their program before getting omnipage 15. Just my .02 cents.