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Rating: 
Summary: Very much the best
Review: I do a great deal of OCR in my research and have scanned tens of thousands of FineReader 6 (FR6). I have also tried every other OCR software that is available for PCs. There are other good packages that can serve some needs adequately, but for my work, FR6 is superior in every respect. In particular it is substantially better than the most popular OCR program, OmniPage Pro 12, as well as quite a bit less expensive. Others might have different preferences depending on what they do and what their equipment and software are.The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM. On this system, FR6 is quite speedy and normally can perform recognition as rapidly as the fastest of desktop scanners will scan. It offers a choice of a fully automatic mode, partly automatic modes, or a very wide selection of user-specified modes. New users will get very good results on most material using the automatic mode and can learn to use its more powerful features as their needs dictate. Even in its automatic mode FR6 is superior to other packages in recognizing difficult text, speed, tools for correcting errors that do appear, and flexibility of output. One notable and important strength of FR 6 for my purposes is its ability to deal with the many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols in the typical academic article. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up. Very often I can scan an entire 20-page article and find not a single mistake. As I say, there are other products which will no doubt serve many people well. If something else comes free my advice would be to try it and see if it fills your needs. However, if you find you need something better, FR6 is the clear choice. If you do have another product be sure to see if you qualify for a "competitive upgrade" to FR6 at an even lower price... Recently ABBYY has brought out version 7.0, which for some reason Amazon carries only in the expensive "corporate" edition, intended for networked operations. The improvements over version 6.0 include somewhat better recognition accuracy; manual control over page splitting; ability to read PDF files, edit, and re-save the edited file in PDF or another format; and improved editing tools. It is definitely worth getting version 7.0 rather than 6.0, but it appears that you have to go to some other vendor than Amazon to get the consumer-oriented "professional" edition.
Rating:
Summary: Abbyy FineReader 6.0 Professional Upgrade
Review: I haven't used any other OCR software packages except the one that came with my scanner. Abby FinePoint is, obviously, far superior. So far, I've had good results. Tables aren't as automatic as I'd like, but things have been moving more and more quickly. It's fairly easy to format tables and graphics. I also like that it doesn't put whole pages of text in text boxes. This was one of the main reasons I decided to upgrade. It was making it difficlut to flawlessly merge multipage documents. Abbyy FinePoint is far better. A couple of things that were't clear to me:
The Presto! OCR 4.0 that CNET recomments is made by Abbyy and is based on their v. 3.0, so you might as well go with the Abbyy 6.0. ... You can buy the upgrade is you have ANY OCR software. I upgraded from the version of Presto! that came as Epson Smart Pannel. That makes this package a great deal. It was also a good deal for me because if you register the product, you get Abbyy FormFiller free. The eliminates the need to ever use a typewriter again. Great for any sort of applications, in my case grant applications. It's saving me tons of time and hassle. ... You can download a sample version .... I highly recommend trying it before buying.
Rating: 
Summary: Register the Product to get Form Filler
Review: I haven't used any other OCR software packages except the one that came with my scanner. Abby FinePoint is, obviously, far superior. So far, I've had good results. Tables aren't as automatic as I'd like, but things have been moving more and more quickly. It's fairly easy to format tables and graphics. I also like that it doesn't put whole pages of text in text boxes. This was one of the main reasons I decided to upgrade. It was making it difficlut to flawlessly merge multipage documents. Abbyy FinePoint is far better. A couple of things that were't clear to me:
The Presto! OCR 4.0 that CNET recomments is made by Abbyy and is based on their v. 3.0, so you might as well go with the Abbyy 6.0. ... You can buy the upgrade is you have ANY OCR software. I upgraded from the version of Presto! that came as Epson Smart Pannel. That makes this package a great deal. It was also a good deal for me because if you register the product, you get Abbyy FormFiller free. The eliminates the need to ever use a typewriter again. Great for any sort of applications, in my case grant applications. It's saving me tons of time and hassle. ... You can download a sample version .... I highly recommend trying it before buying.
Rating:
Summary: Abbyy FineReader 6.0 Professional Upgrade
Review: Integrates well with Word. Works well under both Windows 98 and Windows XP Professional edition. Using with Mustek Bearpaw 1200 USB scanner with no problems. Marked improvement over the TextBridge software that came with the scanner. Works well with both photos, handwriting documents, and typed documents. Would highly recommend this product for both home and business use.
Rating:
Summary: Multilingual OCR that works!
Review: The FineReader OCR package performs as advertized. I required a package that worked with other alphabets and FineReader fit the bill. I was able to perform OCR on faint 9.5 point Czech typeface with no training -- and I got Czech spell checking to boot.The package is so simple that I failed to read the manual for the first week of use, then when I finally read it, discovered all kinds of OCR aids built into the package. The FineReader does everything I need and more. What's more, you can download a fully operational package and use it for two weeks to be sure it does what you want.
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