Prizmo 4 › Pro Scanning + OCR App Reviews

I have been trying to understand this app for some time now. Creating a new document and scanning leads to a dead-end with no feedback from the app. the website "help" offers no basic instruction. I maintain a website, an office LAN, and am proficient with most of the Adobe CS programs. I must conclude this app is badly designed.

Use this program all the time on my MAC. It is fast and works great. Very fast and accurate OCR from scans or pictures of text. Very fast and accurate.

Developers have not thought through even the simplest of use cases. I have never felt so bad after making any purchase. Apple should come up with some kind of return policy for such crappy apps.

Because I need to constantly scan and OCR a variety of written materials, Ive been working with OCR programs on the Mac from the moment they first appeared. (My first Mac was the MacPlus.) Some of these were sufficient for the task, but none did what they did without causing frustration and sometimes outright anger. Early on there was WordScan, then OmniPage Pro, and more recently, ReadIris Pro, and ABBYY FineReader, all of which I have owned and used, and each of which caused problems unique unto themselves. Prizmo 2 isnt perfect, but I know from the sense of amazement and relief I feel whenever I use it, that I have my foot, at least, in the Promised Land. It deals with difficult jobs (scans of antique books), quirky fonts, and multiple columns with ease. There are problems: it is hit or miss with fractions (the other programs, however, were all miss), it combines words rightly separated by hyphens when these fall at the end of a line (as in finemesh strainer), and there is the occasional loose screw (failing to recognize a quite ordinary word). On the other hand, I recently scanned a text with "Wurstsalat" and "Fleishsalat" and it didnt even blink. To sum up: this program is not does what it is supposed to without struggle, but it eases the soul. Highly recommended. (And take in consideration that this is the first software review Ive ever written in over twenty-five years as an active Mac user.)

I dont undestand all the negative reviews, I completed my first OCR successfully in 30 seconds, without reading any directions. The only thing that caught me up was the "New Document" step, where I was trying to open a PDF directly. I have been using ABBY for some time, which works fine, but seems to be more confusing than this. I havent put Prizmo through its paces yet with scanned forms, but so far it seems faster than ABBY and is more intuitive for me to use.

So, this is still the “best” OCR app for mac. That said, it is fairly terrible and in desparate need of an update. 1. The app crashes in Mavericks. Completely unusable. 2. Updates are few and far between. For $100 I expect great support and fast updates. Not abandonware. 3. For my previous comments, see below: Overall the app is amazing, but there are some huge issues with the pro-pack – making it almost worthless (hence the 2 stars). The automator function, which is really the only useful feature in the pro-pack, is missing any customization options. There is no ability to make the automator action apply any adjustments to the images, so you have to write a separate script to do that (which is a hassle). Very lame guys.

So far just using it to OCR scanned PDFs, and it seems to work fine. Price is a bit steep for what it does, but… To the commenter that wants to save to other formats— try the standard OS X “share” button to export to File of whatever format you’re interested in. It’s right there, in the main window, at the bottom right. ‘pzdoc’ is only the format for the project file.

Spreadsheets come in as a hopeless collection of computer codes. I’m not sure why it can’t scan in a line as a line, but it doesn’t. I’m trying Abby Finereader pro,m which costs a hundred bucks but says it imports to Excel spreadsheets.

Yes, it works with automator to make a “watched folder” and automatically do OCR on scans. BUT, many inaccuracies (ie text not converted or converted incorrectly) compared to Adobe OCR, fonts are changed, and overall appearance can be dramatically different (i.e. tables show only text and none of the other formatting)

Simple, lightway, fast & easy, does what so many fail to do! Hands down better then Abby finereader, not as good as a adobe, but for handling 1-20 pages I go to this overy time! Adobe is just to clunky for simple stuff, plus the iOS of this is not bad also!

Could be the worst OCR scanning tool I’ve ever purchased. The errors from OCR is beyond acceptable. Card scanning is useless, for pictures and text as an image it does work and it’s “light weight”. the GUI is very simple to interact with but, the OCR functionality is just horrific.

This overpriced app can not hadle a larger PDF file. It occupys all your system resources and shuts down your system constantly. In the end it delivers a very very slow, and inaccurate OCR. When it has finally finished, the export function is not executing properly. It has wasted three days of my life since my computer can’t do anything when the OCR is running. This app is absolutely horrible.

I WASTED 50 DOLLARS ON THIS APP THAT DOES NOT WORK AT ALL!! DO NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE. Such a waste of money...

Best scanning/OCR app for the Mac if you need to scan documents either from a scanner or camera, will do all sorts of image manipulation, cropping, cleanup, etc. Hats off for Yosemite on day one! The OCR works well too, and you can edit the result in case recognition errors. As owner of iPhone version, I recommend it as it enables editing the same documents: you quickly grab’em with the phone, comfortably edit on the Mac with iCloud syncing. I had an issue with some PDF file I wanted to recognise, but the developer answered rapidly with a solution. I’m all set and I like this app. Developers: you get my 5 stars. Keep up with the good work!

This application works great! I have tons of reading to do for a MBA program, and my eyes get tired and I just need to multi-task and get through some case studies and wish somebody would just read them to me... The case studies are always in PDF format, so Prizmo works great at the OCR scan everytime. If there is an error, its because the PDF is of very poor quality. Once I realized it uses the Mac accessibility support voices, I downloaded the entire lot of english speaking voices. From Fiona to Serena to Alex! I prefer Tessa from South Africa her pronounication is extremely clear and human but Serena from the UK is close second. Sorry USA Allison Siri is enough… Prizmo, scans, saves, and reads the PDF back like a charm. Note: there was a regional error with my version, all I got was Alex USA voice, but once I notified them, they said the fix was coming. It came, and all works perfectly and the voices are now all there… It is extremely rare for small software outfits to answer bug reports, even more rare to update you when they are fixed, and delightful that they actually fix the bug! If you need an OCR program with voice, this is it. Its nice to sometimes use various ways to input information, and this really hits it. The highlighting of the text as it reads is also a great feature. If they could add a save voice to MP3 as in app purchase it would be killer to sync to ipad or iPhone..

Really surprised out how quickly it picks up text. Editing scanned documents, cropping, and adding OCR can be done in a snap.

I’ve used Prizmo on my Mac and iPads for several years. I’m glad to see this latest version that makes the app function correctly on El Capitan. At first glance Prizmo may seem like your run of the mill OCR application. However, a thorough examination of its capabilities places it heads above competing products I own and have used. Being available on both the Mac and iOS devices, and having iCloud connectivity, makes it possible to access documents between platforms. Interfacing with iOS device cameras and Mac scanners makes input quick and easy; and images stored in the Photos application can be accessed as well. You can snap photos of pages with your iPhone or iPad (or even take iDevice screen captures) and then access those in Prizmo for Mac to process them. A feature I didn’t know about until a while ago is the ability to click an icon in the menu bar while Prizmo is running, then draw a rectangle around text in any application and have it OCRd and copied to the clipboard. This has made it extremely convenient to OCR information on the fly from other applications that are not enabled for copying text—like magazines or books that are images rather than copyable text. All in all I have to say that I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth out of this application since I bought it.

Each time I check recognize the program closes. The help tab was not helpful (I checked for updates and restarted the mac). I want a refund

I’m really into digitizing all my stuff right now, and I’ve used this app to scan many books, magazines, and other miscellaneous odds and ends for years. So far it’s never failed to work extremely well. I scan directly to it from my USB scanner, and the scans come out crystal clear gorgeous. I especially like the gutter correction feature for books and magazines, and the software’s specific image adjustment feature for different types of scanned materials. For example, it has a specific image adjustment for when I’m scanning magazines, and the results look fanastic - it virtually eliminates the image on the other side of the thin magazine page from showing through. A similar image adjustment for scanned books makes them look almost like a page typed out in Word, instead of a photocopied scan. All in all this app works really well for my needs and I hope it’s around for a long time! I also have their matching iOS app, which works well due to their tight iCloud integration. I mostly use my Mac to scan things, but it’s handy having the companion app for quickly scanning receipts and such on the go with my iPhone’s camera. If I scan something on one device, it’s immediately visible in all the others, which is really neat. As for OCR, of course any software won’t get 100% of the text right, especially if the original scan wasn’t so great, but after not being successful at getting apps such as Adobe and Abby to work at all on my Mac, I couldn’t believe how well this one worked for me. After scanning, it usually takes no longer than 5-10 minutes to recognize one of my books (usually roughly 100-200 pages). The results vary depending on the original font, scan quality, etc, but it’s usually pretty good. The devs here have definitely done a great job with this and I believe in recognizing a job well done when I see it, hence this review. :)