IRIS ReadIris Pro 11.0 (Mac) [Old Version]

I actually bought this a number of months ago before "[old version]" was clearly marked, then I went out of town on business. Upon return and opening I found out that "[old version]" doesn't only mean an older version of ReadIris, but that this version of ReadIris won't run on the newer iMac Mountain Lion. At all. I can't rate it because it won't run and IRIS doesn't seem to be in any hurry at all to offer an upgrade. Glad I didn't pay much for it and it isn't worth the hassle to return. Any suggestions on a decent OCR that will run on Mountain Lion?

I bought ReadIris 7 based on its price and on the claims made on the package. It was terrible. ReadIris promos and manuals claim the program gets smarter as you use it. That is undoubtedly true, but it starts out so stupid that you have a huge amount of work ahead of you just to get it functioning even close to the way it should. Frequently it expects you to go through an entire document with it and tell it which bitmaps represent which letter. This can be incredibly time consuming.When ReadIris 11 came out, I figured that four versions later it probably does the things it says it does. It doesn't. I still had the same problem with it garbling large portions of a text image, so I wanted to see what it would do with a perfect text. I created a Word file, saved it as a PDF, and then saved the PDF as a JPEG. Since the text was perfect, ReadIris should have been able to process it perfectly. However, it still garbled about 10 percent of the text and expected me to go through the bitmaps again and tell it how to read things.ReadIris 11 is also very crash prone if your page contains graphics. The box and the manual say it can process these things well, but today it crashed five or six times trying to process a document that contained simple black-and-white graphics. It succeeded in processing it only after I went into a photo editing program and removed the graphics from the image. This crashing is a serious problem, because I have a brand-new Macintosh G5 with 1.5 GB of RAM. If it crashes so easily on my machine, what does it do in more modest computers?One odd but telling thing about ReadIris 11 is that the box and manual claim that it can perform certain tasks "perfectly". If a software company is so naive as not to know that, in the US market, claiming a product performs "perfectly" can lead to an expensive fraud suit, it should set off an alarm in the consumer's head.A far better Mac OCR program, which, sadly, is not sold as a standalone, is the OS X version of FineReader that was found on the utility disks that came with Epson all-in-one printers a year or two ago. In contrast to ReadIris, this program does perform almost perfectly, but you can't buy it in a box or as a download, unfortunately.

Haven't been able to find a way to upgrade to my new OS 10.8.2 system to be able to find my HP PhotoSmart scanner as input device

I have not used this product too extensively, but it is useful and stable. I turned PDF documents into editable MS Word documents. I have not used my scanner yet to try that aspect. Making the document editable is not exactly a straightforward process, but with a bit of experimenting, I got what I was hoping for. Simply it should go straight from ReadIris to Word, but it seems to come out in another format (Richtext?) that then has to be saved, renamed, and reopened in Word to get the desired result. It does save time not having to retype contracts and such (I am a lawyer).

I've used ReadIris before and was very satisfied. I was glad I could find at a reasonable price. It does everything I want it to do and is very accurate. Works great with Mac Leopard operating system.

Tried to load ReadIris 11 and it is for Power PC. The instructions say OS 10.4 in the package, but my Macbook Air OS 10.7.2 says Power PC. It is a good deal if you have an older Mac.1 star because it won't work on newer Macs.

This worked for me for a couple years, then had a glitch. It seems since it was bundled with my Laserjet M1212nf MFP, they don't support it. HP still sells this product, but they don't offer any advice about it either. Any help or technical support is pretty useless--from both Readiris and HP. I came across this set of reviews after looking again in vain for anything that might give me a clue how to get this working again. I wonder if the Readiris 11 product might not have been included as a type of "loss leader" so that once you get used to it and it ultimately fails or becomes out-of-sync with the current OSX operating system, you have to buy their new version. It works quite nicely--when it's working. When it stops, you are stuck. No way do I want to pay money for something like this. I wish they were more like Apple, as Apple's products just tend to work.

Recognition accuracy no where near as good as my PC program Abbyy Finereader. Same remark about formatting retention. A sacrifice for moving to Mac, I fear.