What on earth is a digital smartpen and how does it differ from other pens on the market?
The well-known Anoto digital pen technology is the path breaking high-tech pen technology that is responsible for transfer of handwritten text from paper into digital media in many of the digital pens on the market today. An essential difference in the Anoto digital pen technology is its sophisticated real-time image processing which can calculate and recreate 100 images per second.
What is the difference between a digital pen and an ordinary pen?
The essential difference lies in the shell of the pen itself. The basic ingredients of a digital pen are the sophisticated miniature camera which captures images of the handwriting, an image processing unit which takes the images and converts them into digital format along with a communication interface. The pen hosts a small ink cartridge which is used for writing on the special paper.
This special paper is divided into small rectangular parts like you see in a graph sheet. The images which are taken with the digital camera are captured with the patterned paper in the background. A special algorithm converts these images into digital format which is then stored into the memory.
What is the Difference between a Digital Smartpen like Livescribe Smartpens and other Pen Recorders?
Here is how the new Livescribe digital smartpens work. Using the special Livescribe dot paper, the pen recorder captures whatever you write and draw. At the same time, the smartpen records synchronized audio sounds made while you take notes or draw. Recorded audio can be played back by tapping the pen to the dot paper at a special word (keyword) or by searching by word or phrase. Tapping synchronizes the replay with timing of your original notes, so you can see exactly what you took down at a given point during the original lecture. The recorded audio visual clips are called pencasts. They can be stored on the pen and transferred to your PC or Mac for storage, updating, searching, retrieval, review and exporting to friends. The pencast works just like any computer file.
A digital smartpen, then, is a pen that electronically stores what you write on paper while capturing the audio and synchronizing the audio text integration. Later you can upload the audio clip, the pencast, to your personal Livescribe Community web space where you can create Custom notebooks, organize notes, update and replay like any other computer files. The Livescribe Desktop software gives you the ability to share your audio files and e-notebooks with the Livescribe Public Community and export your notes and audio to PDF formats and via internet to other computers and mobile phones.
The audio integration of Livescribe digital smartpens is a major enhancement to digital pen technology.