All kinds of text are transferred directly into your micro with the Omni-Reader. Character reference by Geof Wheelwright

A tough assignment. I collected a large cardboard box holding a device which would eliminate the paperclip office by 'reading' paper documents into text files on a micro.

I was excited by the prospect of being able to have all my favourite reviews, articles and program listings transferred into my micro without the tedious typing bit. I even had visions of selling the filing cabinet.

Oberon International's Omni-Reader is an under £500 optical character reader (OCR) which runs on any micro fitted with an RS232 serial communications interface and a terminal communications program. I tried it with several micros: a Compaq portable IBM compatible, the Tandy Model 100 portable and the NEC PC-8201A portable.

Expecting something sturdy and precise, I opened the box to find a plastic tablet, supporting a plastic hinged ruler with a plastic read head and a series of somewhat confusing LED lights running along the top of the device. There was a whiff of Heath Robinson about the thing.

Moving to the back, I noted the 'interfaces' and function switches. The device has a socket at the far right for the mains (an external power supply generates the necessary voltage), a socket for the read head lead and a full-spec 25-line RS232 D-plug socket. There are also two sets of DIP switches; the first sets baud rate, the second sets communciations functions (pitch of type, handshaking, beep on/off, international character set selection).

After fruitless hours trying to use the Omni-Reader I sent out for another - the original review machine's read head was defective. With the new machine, my original frustration soon turned to fascination.

The reader was still hard to use, and I had to move the head across the text at exactly the right spot and at the right speed, but I did get it working, and for a machine costing under £500, I consider that a major achievement.

Using the Omni-Reader is initially like driving someone else's car; you know what you're supposed to do, and what the car should do, but you don't know you must stick your finger in the dashboard and wiggle it to get the turn signal working. It's a matter of getting the knack before you can use the device properly.

The Omni-Reader works off a standard RS232 serial interface and should operate with any machine with a full-specification RS232 and RS423 (the Beeb's serial interface). The manufacturers, Oberon, kept the system 'open' by not supplying any cable as standard equipment. But this leaves it up to you to make your own cable, with either a standard D-plug or a BBC-style DIN plug on the other end.

The communications protocols are a little unusual, but they seem to work; No Parity, one start bit, eight data bits and two stop bits. Most communications or 'terminal' programs let you set these, but make sure yours does before you invest in the Oberon system.

The difficulty of interpreting the meaning of the LED indicators at the top of the machine could possibly be simplified with a little embedded LCD display, to give an English language reading telling you what's going on at any given moment. And guide rails on both sides of the Omni-Reader, along with a more sturdy ruler, would make the system much less something you have to get the hang of.

I'm sure that having developed this technology for the current machine, we can look foward to an enhanced or more upmarket OCR soon. The basic components are there.

The Omni-Reader is a good idea in need of a few refinements. Because the price is comparatively low, it's hard to complain, but I wouldn't mind paying up to £100 more to make it a little more sturdy and a bit easier to use.

I see the Omni-Reader as the ZX81 of the optical character reader world - it's cheap, it works, but it's difficult to use and limited in its power. I can hardly wait for the 'Spectrum'.

Features 3/5
Documentation 3/5
Performance 3/5
Overall value 4/5