Lenovo Flex 20 review: This tabletop all-in-one makes too many compromises

Lenovo Flex 20 $800.00 The Lenovo Flex 20 makes a lot of compromises to achieve its light weight and low price. Most people would be better off saving a little more cash to buy a machine they won’t outgrow so quickly.

PC manufacturers seem convinced that everyone wants a Windows tablet, be it 8 inches or big enough to double as a TV tray. The larger models are effectively all-in-one PCs that can lie flat to allow several people to interact with the touchscreen at once.

Lenovo scored a 4-star win with its 27-inch Horizon. The Flex 20, which the company describes as a “dual-mode desktop,” is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than the Horizon, addressing two of the complaints we lodged against that machine. Regrettably, in the Flex 20 those advantages come at the cost of performance and resolution, two shortcomings that pretty much ruin the table-gaming experience.

ROBERT CARDIN

The spring-loaded hinge on the Lenovo Flex 20’s back panel allows you to position it at nearly any angle, including completely flat. 

The Flex 20’s specs read more like those of a bargain-basement cheapie than of a machine you’d expect to play games on. Powering the Flex 20 are a dual-core fourth-generation Intel Core i3-4010U processor, integrated Intel HD 4400 Graphics, just 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory, and a 500GB mechanical hard drive that spins its platters at 5400 rpm. The saddest spec of all is the screen resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels—a 19.5-inch IPS display needs 1080p.

ROBERT CARDIN

Perhaps Lenovo’s engineers don’t want you to reduce the Flex 20’s portability by hanging too many devices from it. But to provide just two USB ports? Really?

The performance is what you’d expect of a machine with such specs. The Flex 20 managed to post a WorldBench 8.1 score of just 78. That’s 22 percent slower than the benchmark results of our reference all-in-one desktop, an Acer Aspire U A5600U-UB13 powered by a third-gen Intel Core i5-3230M. The 27-inch Horizon, meanwhile, delivered a WorldBench 8.1 score of 111. And Dell’s XPS 18 Touch—another all-in-one tablet/hybrid—scored an impressive 171 (with the assistance of its 32GB SSD cache drive).

The Lenovo Flex 20’s battery life is very good, but the machine turned in an otherwise disappointing benchmark performance. 

What does that mean for family game night? A lot of waiting. Lenovo created a custom interface called Aura, designing it in a ring so that users can control the tablet from any side of the screen. Launching a game in Aura left me on a blank screen long enough for me to start wondering whether the game was actually launching or if the whole thing had crashed (which it did, on occasion).

Battery life is adequate for a quick evening of gaming. The Flex 20 lasted 3 hours, 25 minutes playing high-def video in our run-down tests, which means the kids could grab it for movie night—and considering that it’s just 7.7 pounds, they could probably get it to their room without your help. Gaming will eat that up a little faster: In our tests, 2 hours of play left the battery with a 25 percent reserve.

The machine has no memory card reader, no HDMI input or video-out, and no optical drive.

Lenovo offers some interesting wireless accessories to enhance the Flex 20’s gaming capabilities: joysticks (which attach to the touchscreen with suction cups), air-hockey strikers (small paddles that glide over the touchscreen), and the E-Dice (a die that tells the computer which side is up after a roll). Unlike with the Horizon, you must purchase the Flex 20 accessories separately: A package with one pair of joysticks and one pair of strikers costs $50, and the E-Dice costs $60. A wireless mouse and keyboard are included with the PC.

The gaming accessories are cool enough; but when it came to the bundled games, the ones that took advantage of them were some of my least favorites. The fishing game that uses the joysticks is slow moving. The air hockey game is decent fun, but it can have up to four controllers on the screen and the computer doesn’t control any of them, so you can’t play alone. Lenovo Tycoon, which relies on the E-Dice, is a painfully slow, overly animated, overly complicated version of Monopoly. My favorite games, King of Opera and DrawRace 2, don’t require the extra baubles at all.

ROBERT CARDIN

Resolution of 1600 by 900 on a 19.5-inch IPS display is another letdown. 

After the Flex 20 failed to win me over during family game night, I set it up in my office to serve as an all-in-one desktop. It wasn’t so great in that role either. Of all the computers I’ve tested, none has had a problem connecting to my Wi-Fi router two floors below. The Flex 20 couldn’t hold a connection.

The included keyboard and mouse connect to a unified USB receiver, which is good because the dongle takes up one of the machine’s two USB 3.0 ports. That leaves you with just one USB port for everything else you might want to hook up. The machine has no memory card reader, no HDMI input or video-out, and no optical drive. It really is like an oversize tablet in that sense.

The idea of a touchscreen all-in-one that you can lay flat on a table is relatively new, so manufacturers are still looking for the right balance of performance, price, portability, and features. Lenovo went all out with the Horizon and then scaled back with the Flex 20. I think the company scaled back too far. Even with the lower-resolution screen, the Core i3 processor isn’t enough to support fluid tabletop gaming, which is where such machines should excel.

The Flex 20’s only saving grace is the fact that Lenovo is selling this computer for cheap. You’ll find it at Best Buy for $800, but at the time of this review I saw it on Lenovo’s own online shopping site for $750. At those prices, it might find a happy life in your child’s playroom.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Flir iPhone 5 Case Makes Ghost Busting Easy

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

MyKronoz ZeSplash Smartwatch Makes Calls, Composes Texts On Tiny Keyboard

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Not Another PDF Scanner 2 review: Free NAPS2 makes documents scans easier

Windows has built-in support for scanning documents. In fact, it not only supports scanning but positively embraces the endeavor, forcing you to save your scanned documents where it thinks they should go, and perform several extraneous steps every time you want to scan a page. If you find that annoying, you should check out NAPS2, which stands for Not Another PDF Scanner 2.

The NAPS2 interface is as simple as could be.

This free, open-source utility doesn't smother you with guidance. Its bare-bones interface lets you set up multiple scanning profiles, each with its own name, resolution, document size, scan source, and so on. When the time comes to scan, you just pick a profile and scan. The images scanned are imported directly into NAPS2, and you can then save them out as images or as PDFs.

NAPS2 supports several image formats, including JPG, PNG, and even TIFF. PDF support is basic and straightforward: Simply select a number of images and click the Save PDF button to produce a PDF that includes them, one per page. You can control the ordering of the pages via toolbar buttons, but you don't get to tune anything else about the PDF. It's as basic as it gets.

Profiles present many settings, but don't take them too seriously: They may not all work.

Not all profile settings work: Despite setting my Receipts profile to scan documents in greyscale, resulting images were in full color. You can resolve it with a third-party image editor like the free IrfanView, but it's still a minor drawback. I also crashed NAPS2 when opting to scan images using the TWAIN Driver, though WIA support worked well for the most part. You can even choose to use the WIA user interface, which lets you preview the image you are about to scan and optionally crop it prior to scanning.

The WIA user interface lets you preview and crop the image prior to scanning.

The only feature I really missed when using NAPS2 was image straightening: When scanning magazine pages, no matter how hard I tried to position the paper straight, it tended to deform as I closed the scanner lid. Many other scanning applications let you partially rotate the scanned page to compensate for this, but NAPS2 doesn't have such a feature. It does let you rotate the page 90 degrees right or left, but that's useful only if you incorrectly orient the page when putting it on the scanner.

Sometimes less is truly more. NAPS2 keeps a narrow focus, resulting in an app that's so simple it doesn't even have a Settings dialog. If you're simply looking to scan a few documents and like to make your own calls about how and where to save them, NAPS2 handily beats the scanning feature built into Windows 8.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Lucidpress review: Free beta makes typesetting simple, accessible, and fun

I have seen the future of typesetting. It happens in your browser, it doesn’t need Flash, and it looks and feels just as nice as Adobe InDesign. It’s also free, at least for now. Lucidpress isn’t even out of Beta yet, but it is already one of the slickest and most surprising Web apps I’ve seen in recent memory. Surprising, as in the multiple times I found myself thinking, “I didn’t know you can do that in a browser” while working on my mock document.

Lucidpress makes it easy to get started with premade templates.

Just like InDesign, Lucidpress presents you with a document containing multiple pages onto which you can lay out your content. You can drag and drop textboxes and images around, recrop images, pick from hundreds of included fonts or upload your own, and more. But Lucidpress goes further, and lets you create documents that are meant to be viewed online, or using a tablet. If you wish, you can include YouTube videos and scrolling areas in your document—ending up with an interesting hybrid that looks as polished as a traditional brochure while seamlessly melding interactivity. It feels sort of like a Harry Potter newspaper.

Want a YouTube video in your document? No problem.

Reading about it, it’s all too easy to mistake Lucidpress for another website-making tool. That is not the case: You don’t make a website, but a PDF, with all the trimmings of professionally produced documents. You get layers, advanced text controls, textbox reflowing, page templates, and just about anything else you would expect from a full-fledged desktop publishing application used for creating magazines, brochures, and other commercial items.

In use, Lucidpress feels like a solid, commercial-quality desktop publishing application.

This sort of thinking, which lets you enjoy the benefits of traditional desktop publishing while extending it with modern features, is used across Lucidpress. For example, you can easily import images from Dropbox using the service’s sophisticated Chooser interface. I didn’t even have to sign into Dropbox or grant Lucidpress access to my account—Dropbox’s Chooser did all of the work, letting me browse my Dropbox, preview images, and pick the one I wanted.

Lucidpress supports several image sources other than Dropbox, including Flickr and Facebook.

Running in a recent stable version of Chrome, Lucidpress feels rock-solid. Since it does run in the browser, however, it is at the mercy of whatever browser extensions you happen to have installed. One Chrome extension caused an issue with resizing images in Lucidpress: Whenever I dragged an image bounding box, the document would scroll. Starting Chrome in Incognito mode, which doesn’t load any extensions, solved the issue for me.

Another key advantage of working in the cloud is collaboration. Lucidpress lets a number of people view and work with a single document at the same time, and includes powerful commenting features. Each document also has its own chat window, making remote collaboration easy.

Comments make it possible to discuss specific parts in the document.

Lucidpress is a pleasant surprise. Rarely are services in Beta so stable and so feature rich, and yet it overdelivers on all fronts. My only hope is that its pricing structure, yet to be announced, keeps it affordable enough so that everyone can make use of it. If that happens, Adobe has reason for concern, at least when it comes to desktop publishing.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Zotero makes research easier, faster, more robust

Everyone researching with electronic sources knows the pains of collecting articles, managing a library, and, worst of all, creating citations. Zotero is a veteran (and completely free) browser add-on that solves nearly all these problems. Originally available only for Firefox, cross-platform tool Zotero has recently become available for Chrome and Safari as well via its standalone desktop version.

Zotero's plugins for Microsoft Office and LibreOffice make it easier to track citations.

Zotero makes it easy to collect research papers off the Web, attach PDFs, find relevant articles in your library, and sync it across PCs. With the help of a Microsoft Word/LibreOffice plugin, Zotero takes the pain out of citations and bibliography, doing all the heavy lifting for you, using any of the major citation styles. It's indispensable for students.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the edition appropriate to your system.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Corel Painter X3 makes natural media more accessible

Corel Painter X3 $429.00 Corel Painter X3 remains a compelling tool for creating traditional-looking artwork with a computer, especially now that it's easier to navigate.

Download Now

Corel Painter faces a problem similar to that of Microsoft Office: When you're already at the top of your field, it's hard to see the path to improvement. Just like Office is the go-to suite for everyday productivity tasks, Corel Painter is the go-to application for serious artists looking to create natural-looking paintings and concept sketches using a computer. That gives Corel the enviable problem of trying to get artists to upgrade from a program that's already more than good enough...a problem the company tackles ably in Painter X3.

Painter's Start screen tries to be both inviting and inspiring.

Corel's solution: Keep the powerful tools, but make everything more accessible. Almost every change and addition in the new Corel X3 is meant to lower the learning curve, make features easier to discover, or make common drawing tasks simpler than they used to be.

Take, for example, the all-new brush search engine: Previous versions of Corel came packed to the gills with impressive brushes, including my personal favorites, Real Watercolor and Real Wet Oil. While established users could appreciate having dozens and dozens of brushes to choose from, novice users could find the sprawling brush selection menu daunting. The new search engine tackles this by avoiding the menu altogether: Simply type "pencil," and get a list of all of the pencil brushes Corel Painter offers, no matter where they are located in the brush menu.

Thanks to the new brush search engine, you no longer have to dig through the menu to find the brush you want.

Even once you find a brush with a name that sounds like what you need ("Real 6B Soft Pencil"), you'd still want to see what it actually looks like on paper. This is where another new feature comes in handy: Stroke preview. Simply hover over the brush's name, and a small pop-up shows you what you can expect once you put the brush to your canvas. The preview shows just a single, isolated stroke, so you will still need to learn how to read it, but it can help.

Corel's cloning feature makes it easy to create paintings based on photos.

Many artists base their paintings on reference images, and Painter X3 makes it relatively easy to inject such images into your workspace. Reference images float in their own mini-windows which you can drag around and even take outside the main Corel Painter window. You can zoom and pan them, and it is easy to quickly sample colors from them.

For budding artists who need more of a helping hand, the newly enhanced cloning workflow can come in handy. You can now place a reference image next to your work, and see a cloning crosshairs moving around on the source image as you work on your painting, letting you easily see what exactly you're cloning. At its simplest, this lets you render a photo into a painting using just a handful of strokes.

The new perspective feature is handy mainly for artists who already know what they're doing.

Another new addition to X3 are perspective guides, which make it easier to draw street scenes, rooms, and other images with a sense of depth and perspective. This feature could be made more accessible in future versions: It currently ships with just four presets bearing names that assume you know what you're doing, such as "Point Standard Horizon" and "Point Worms-Eye View."

All in all, Painter X3 is an iterative release, with no major groundbreaking features...but really, Corel Painter doesn't need such features to retain its lead in the natural-media painting world. Making the application more accessible is a good move, and one that I hope to see continued in the next iteration of this venerable art application.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Raptr Desktop App makes gaming social

Raptr Desktop App Raptr is the perfect place to store all your gaming data and lord your stats over your friends, and the desktop app adds tasty extras.

Download Now

Social networks are great for family and friends to share their favorite details of life, but there aren't enough places specifically for gamers to congregate. Gamers need a place to use a handle instead of a name and emphasize gaming skills over baby pictures. Social network Raptr connects all your gamer friends in one place, stockpiles a ton of gaming data, and ranks you among the masses. In the latest version of Raptr's PC desktop app, you can show off your skills to the world with the newly integrated video streaming feature via Twitch.

The Raptr Desktop App lets you keep all your games in one place and launch any of them with one click.

Raptr tracks your Xbox, Playstation, Steam and other various games installed on your hard drive. Just add your PSN, Steam, and Xbox Live accounts and use the game scanner to find everything not in your Steam library. It's ridiculously easy, and it imports all your playtime and achievements automatically. While on the PC, the Raptr Game Launcher can launch any game you have installed, whether DRM-free or through Origin or Steam. It's like the mega-Steam, perfect for the organized aficionado.

Raptr comes with a desktop-based dashboard packed with robust widget options that you can be activate while in a game, much like the Steam overlay. Most of these launch into Raptr's own little Web browser and display things like Gmail, popular gaming sites, social networking sites, and YouTube. You can also take screen shots and, of course, open your Raptr-related profile and games page.

Raptr Desktop App's summary of your game session shows your time played and rank.

Perhaps the most exciting feature, and the newest included widget, is the ability to stream video via Twitch—no extra software needed. Simply log in to Twitch via Raptr, and your stream automatically starts up with the touch of a button. You can manage the stream, share it via social networks, and participate in the chat without having to leave the game. This is a welcome feature that is incredibly helpful to anyone who wants to jump in on the popular pastime of video game streaming.

Like a competitive game, Raptr scores and ranks you against everyone else on the service after every game session. The more you play and earn achievements, the better you rank against everyone else. Even if you're looking at just your own stats, you can work your way from Newbie to Elite. After each game session, a little popup informs you of your progress and your rank. It's a fun meta game.

You can get some pretty sweet stuff from Raptr just by playing your games. The Rewards feature offers things like cosmetic items, coupons, DLC, and special offers for completing requirements in game. Most of the requirements revolve around being a certain rank in a game, having a verified email, and installing the desktop app. It's a fun little incentive that only expands that meta game mentioned above.

With the Raptr Desktop app, you can use any of Raptr's tools from inside your game—no minimizing required.

Raptr has a lot to offer gamers, whether they're casual or hardcore. The streaming feature alone is worth the free download, but the fact that it's great for organizing your game library and tracking your gaming statistics while ranking you against your peers makes it the perfect gaming social network tool.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the desktop app.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Smideo HD 2013 makes smart-looking video slideshows

Showing off your photos is easy enough. But showing off your photos and your videos together—including videos that you may have spread across different services—isn't always that easy, especially when you want to add custom audio files to the mix. Smideo HD 2013 can help: This (mostly) easy-to-use application allows you to create video slideshows that look polished and  professional.

Before you begin your first project, Smideo shows you how to get started.

Smideo's name comes from "Smart Video Creator," and it fits, as the application is smart. You can try it free for 30 days, but the trial version will not allow you to create HD videos. You have to pay a little over $26 to unlock that feature.

Smideo lets you add files from your camera, hard drive, or those stored in various online photo and video repositories.

Smideo's step-by-step approach makes it easy to get started with your project. First, you have to create a Smideo library by populating it with the photos and videos you'd like to use in your slideshow. You can add individual files, entire photos, or download content from YouTube or Flickr. Anyone looking to create an instructional video will appreciate that Smideo lets you film your screen and share that screencast as part of your video, too. Once you have your files ready, you select the ones you'd like to use and move on.

If your video isn't the right file type, Smideo handles the conversion for you.

If Smideo gives you the option of cutting any video you've added into smaller chunks. When you move on to the next step—arranging the order of the slideshow—you can insert these smaller video chunks in with the photos you've chosen. You also can add text overlays to your content, and set the picture length as you desire. Next, you add any desired audio tracks to the slideshow. If you'd like you can record your own audio using your PC's microphone.

You can sort your photos and videos as you'd like, or let Smideo arrange them randomly.

When you're finished, you select the video effects for your finished product: relaxing or dynamic. This changes the transition between the photos and videos in the slideshow, either speeding them up or slowing them down. It would be nice to have more options here. Rival Fantashow, for example, allows you to preview the transitions and lets you use different styles in a single slideshow.

Still, Smideo will appeal to home and business users who want control over the look and feel of their slideshow. Unlike Fantashow, it doesn't require that you select a theme the slideshow; Smideo lets your content shine. But its options may prove overwhelming for casual users, who will likely be more comfortable with the hand-holding that Fantashow offers.

Liane Cassavoy is a veteran technology and business journalist. She contributes regularly to PCWorld and has written about business issues and products for Entrepreneur Magazine and other publications. She is the author of two business start-up guides published by Entrepreneur Press.
More by Liane Cassavoy

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

OCR makes short work of digitizing your docs

The file cabinet looms large in the office, yet it guards its secrets jealously...even from you. It's time to convert those papers to space-saving, easy-to-find digital documents. For that, you need a scanner to turn them into digital images and an Optical Character Recognition program to convert those images into editable and searchable documents. I took four of the latest OCR programs and a free online OCR service for a test spin. All of them work to varying degrees.

To test the programs, I ran 22 varied and not particularly clean scans of documents—including one hand-written note—through four OCR programs and one free service. I looked for accuracy in text recognition, image extraction, and the ability to recreate them in a Word document. In addition, I processed 264 separate scans from a yearbook for output as a searchable PDF.

You don't actually need to install OCR software if you need to convert only a couple of small documents. You can use a free service such as Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, which is about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.

Free-OCR makes you jump through a CAPTCHA hoop, but does it apologetically.

Although you don't have to register or even fork over your email address, the Free-OCR site does make you fill in one of those annoying CAPTCHAs. (Thanks, Web bad guys, for making everyone's life more difficult.) However, those CAPTCHAs serve to remind one just how difficult OCR can be. If humans, with our incredible heuristic abilities, occasionally have problems with these, just think how poor straight-line software perusing a stream of bits must feel.

Free-OCR did a decent job of extracting the text from the test documents. With standard typed pages, you should have no problems as long as you don't have fancy plans for the scanned text: The site does not output files or recreate documents. It simply places the extracted text in a box for cutting and pasting. As a matter of fact, embedded graphics tend to confuse the output.

Free-OCR s text capture works well, but even simple graphics confuse the website.

Free-OCR is not suitable for large jobs or overly complex documents, but when all you need is to quickly get the text out of a basic document scan, it will do nicely in most cases.

Tip: Use Microsoft Paint to reduce the size of any image you wish to use to 150 dpi.

FreeOCR is a nice, simple front-end for HP's public-domain Tesseract OCR engine (now used by Google) and is roughly the installable equivalent of the unrelated Free-OCR website. It interfaces directly with scanners in addition to importing image files, and it extracts text into a box from which you can cut and paste. The program is extremely easy to use and works well if all you want is text. It even extracts text from PDFs, though it exports only to text.

FreeOCR, though unrelated to Free-OCR, is just as easy to use.

FreeOCR processes only one image at a time, but will OCR multi-page PDFs. And, unlike the Free-OCR website, there's no limit on file size. Also, FreeOCR can create Word and RTF documents from the text it extracts, but it's just pasted text: There's no attempt to reconstruct the document or place images.

Read this dialog box and select your options carefully when clicking through FreeOCR's installation.

As far as it goes, FreeOCR is a neat little program, though it tries to install toolbars and reset your browser home page. You can install the program while cancelling and declining all offers (though it's unintuitive and the negative response buttons are grayed out). If you couldn't do that, you wouldn't be reading about FreeOCR 4.2 in this roundup.

X is a busy character these days. Not only is it still used traditionally in words, it's featured in the end of movie credits as the Roman "10," and has achieved rock star status as shorthand for eXtreme. It's even used in the name of Acrobat XI. Best of all, it can be used to illustrate one the major tools available to OCR technologists for recognizing symbols: context, i.e., looking at what surrounds a character to help identify it.

Acrobat XI Standard is very good at leveraging context and does a bang-up job of recreating entire documents, including text, images, and layout, then outputting them as the increasingly popular editable PDFs, .RTF, and Word docs. If outputting documents that look like the original is your focus, it's great. It is, however, a little less aggressive and slightly less successful at extracting text from some images than Nuance OmniPage and Abbyy FineReader, which are reviewed below.

The Readiris OCR engine gives Adobe Acrobat XI an edge in accuracy.

Acrobat XI lacks the side-by-side comparison of original documents with their recreated doppelgangers that most programs offer: Word, RTF, and the like are simply saved. However, the output files are very accurate (thanks to the Readiris OCR engine), and you can fine-tune the results of PDFs in-line with the "Find OCR suspects" function.

Although Acrobat XI is primarily for PDFs, its OCR is so good that you can easily forgo an auxiliary OCR program if you buy it. But at $499 for the Pro version and $299 for Standard, it is expensive. OmniPage and FineReader perform OCR and handle the PDF basics for considerably less cash.

OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) is Acrobat XI's equal at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.

At defaults, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a great job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.

OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. Like Acrobat, OmniPage also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.

OmniPage Ultimate 19 is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool. Maybe Nuance will even consider handwriting OCR in the future.

Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.

Abbyy's dual-paned interface makes it easy to compare originals to OCR.

FineReader is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR'd text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including ePub, editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.

FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.

While the $170 Professional Edition that I tested slightly more expensive than OmniPage Standard, it is also available in a capable $50 Express 9 version.

OCR programs are as useless unless they have digitized images to work with. For that, you need a scanner.

A fast sheet-fed scanner that scans both sides of the page simultaneously is worth its weight in gold for anyone with lots of two-sided business documents to transfer into the digital domain. HP's Scanjet Professionals or Fujitsu's ScanSnaps are available for under $500.

A garden-variety A4/letter-sized flatbed scanner such as Canon's $200 CanoScan 9000F or similar is great for small to standard-sized photos, magazine articles, etc.

For oversized books, such as atlases or the high-school yearbook used in my testing, you'll need something that handles larger documents. I used Plustek's pricey but fast $600 Optic Pro A320. Mustek makes a variety of cheaper, albeit slower large-format scanners.

TIp: Most scanners bundle competent, albeit less comprehensive, versions of the software we've covered. Grab your scanner first, then see if you need to upgrade the software.

If PDFs are your focus, then Acrobat XI is a very good choice, though you'll pay a lot for either Standard or Pro. Most users will be just fine with the less expensive OmniPage Standard 18 or Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional version. OmniPage gets a slight nod if you're outputting RTF or Word documents, but it's otherwise a tie.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
More by Jon L. Jacobi

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Fantashow makes (almost) fantastic videos

Fantashow Pro $50.00 Fantashow offers an easy way to create a slideshow composed of photos and video clips, but even its plainest design options add some effects.

Download Now

Plenty of applications help you show off your photos, and plenty help you show off your videos. But too few tools exist that allows you to show them off together. Enter Fantashow Pro, a $50-per-year (or $5-per-month) application allows you to combine still photos with videos to create a custom video slideshow.

Fantashow's "Anytime" themes are its plainest templates, but even these include a bit of animation.

I like that Fantashow offers some advanced features, such as the ability to convert unsupported audio and video files and the option to change the transition times between photos. And I like that the latest version adds a much-needed feature: plain templates for users who don't want or need a lot of animation in their slideshow background.

In some ways, Fantashow is very similar to Wondershare's excellent DVD Slideshow Builder Deluxe. That program allows you to create a video slideshow from still photos, complete with your own music soundtrack, opening and closing credits, and (if you want them) animated themes.

What's nice about DVD Slideshow Builder Deluxe is that it offers two modes: Standard and Advanced. Standard lets you add a background template to your slideshow, while Advanced lets you create a more customizable slideshow, free of background templates. Fantashow could benefit from this type of option.

Fantashow's attractive layout shows a preview of your photo, as well as ribbon at the bottom of the screen that makes it easy to see which pictures and videos you've already added to your slideshow.

As it stands with Fantashow, you're required to select a template before you can begin to create your video slideshow. Fantashow does include dozens of template options, most of which tend to be a bit cutesy: Think animated hearts and virtual scrapbooks. A few simpler templates are available—and many of the animated themes are attractive—and the latest version adds several plain templates.

Still, these plain options are templates, and each one adds some effects to your video slideshow, whether it's transitions that slice photos in half, or a photo that bounces into place on your screen. These templates are plain enough to satisfy most personal users, but business users looking to create a corporate-looking slideshow will be disappointed that there isn't a simple option to not select a theme.

The "Cut Effect" theme transitions between photos by slicing them in half.

Adding photos and videos to your slideshow is a cinch, though, and I like how Fantashow converts any video files to the right format before letting you add them to the slideshow. The attractive interface makes it easy to preview your photos and videos before adding them to your slideshow, and a ribbon view of your slideshow along the bottom of the screen lets you see the photos and videos you've added in the order they'll appear in the slideshow.

Fantashow offers a decent amount of customization options, including the ability to add a voice over to certain photos, the ability to adjust the time each photo is displayed, and the ability to add some cool effects, such as a sketch-like design to photos. It also includes basic editing tools that let you crop or rotate your photos. All of these are simple enough so as not to overwhelm even those new to photo tools.

Once your video slideshow is finished, you can export for viewing on a mobile device or DVD, or save it to a PC-friendly format for sharing and viewing on your computer. Wondershare handles the conversion for you, and allows you to choose between standard and high definition. If you're using the free Lite version of Fantashow, all videos that you output will be branded with a watermark.

You can see your photos and video clips in order, and easily edit and rearrange them.

Wondershare's Fantashow has a lot to like, as too few slideshow programs let you combine videos and photos in one finished product. It's also attractively designed and works very well.

Note: The Download button will download the software to your system.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Zombies!!! makes for gruesome Windows 8 gaming fun

The dead are a problem. Whether they are the walking or evil varieties, their predilection for eating flesh is proving to be a problem for those who prefer to keep their organs intact. That’s the basis for Zombies!!!, a new game of post-apocalyptic survival from Babaroga. It’s based on a popular board game from Twilight Creations in which players compete to escape from a town infested with brain-biters.

You can help or hinder your fellow players with Event cards.

In this Windows 8 version, up to four players vie to be the first to reach a heliport, where there is one empty seat on the last flight out of zombietown (population: lots, and they are all hungry for brains). Alternatively, you can win by double-tapping 25 zombies. While searching for the heliport, you can explore locations such as hardware stores and houses to find useful things, such as chainsaws or bullets, but there are also zombies waiting for you in there.

You can also use event cards to slow other players (such as the claustrophobia card, which makes them run out of buildings) or speed your own journey (such as the alternate food source card, where the zombies find something else to eat and don’t bother you). In each turn, you also get to move some of the zombies, so you can point them in the direction of a tasty snack, such as another player. As you progress through the map, it becomes a tactical game: Do you use your cards to speed yourself, or block other users? Does it make sense to move the zombies out of your way, or direct them to your competitors? There is also a survival mode, which drops you into zombieville to see how long you can last.

Combat is based on the role of a dice, modified by the cards in play.

The graphics are very cartoony, which makes the gun and chainsaw-related violence a little more abstract than in most zombie TV shows. The game ran smoothly on the low-end tablet that I tried it on, so it should run well on most systems, and the sound and graphics added well to the atmosphere.

Because it is based on a card game, Zombies!!! uses a turn-based approach and favors strategy. The combat is based on the roll of a dice and the cards in play, not the speed of your reactions. This means that those looking for a gore-filled twitch fest will be disappointed, but those who like to think before they tap will appreciate the strategic and competitive angle of the game.

Darn, dead again. Fortunately, being eaten just puts you back at the starting point with a reduced score.

Zombies!!! is an amusing (if blood-soaked) game, and the computer version retains much of the charm of the card game, while enhancing it with cartoonish sound effects and visuals. The game carries a teen rating, and that’s appropriate: Although the violence is strictly for comic effect, younger children might find some of the death scenes a little unsettling. But, as the old saying goes, the family that slays together, stays together, and Zombies!!! could be a cute, creepy addition to a game night.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Windows 8 store, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Richard Baguley has been writing about, testing and breaking technology for the past 20 years. He has written for Wired, Macworld, USA Today, Amiga Format and many others
More by Richard Baguley

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference