Let’s not lie, we thought Prizmo sounded great and then we opened it up, and we thought it would be a really good idea, and then – well, we’ll get to that later. Prizmo is a product of Creaceed, previously known as eX-cinder, a company that has been along all things Cocoa for a while now. They have authored a couple of other notable apps: Hydra (HDR), Vocalia (iPhone Speech Recognition) and a couple of others. When we heard about Prizmo, we thought it sounded a little odd, but a great idea and we weren’t too far off in the end.
Introducing Prizmo
Our intrigue for Prizmo came from its advertised OCR software. For those that haven’t worked in a law firm recently, OCRing is a lifesaver. Apparently OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, but, all we know is who ever invented it was really smart. OCRing takes a document in which text is not selectable and recognizes it and makes it selectable. In other words, you could take your local newspaper, OCR it and then edit it in your favorite word processor. In addition, Prizmo allows for the correction of distortion and straightening of your images.
The Thing We Don’t Understand
“Of your images.” Those three words sum up Prizmo so well. Images ? PDFs, end of story. Most OCR applications have two main sources: external scanner and PDFs. Why PDFs? It’s the industry standard. They are universally read on Macs and PCs and don’t lose any formatting. Prizmo doesn’t support either. Most users would just stop at this point, as for most users Prizmo is not a solution.
So How Does It Work?
It’s unorthodox, but it makes some sense. You take a picture with your camera of a document or whatever you wish to scan. Upload that .jpg (or other image file) and OCR it from there. At first, one would likely think that this is not logical at all. But, a lot of scanners are awful, just awful. Prizmo isn’t targeted at those that need to OCR documents on a daily basis, but more at the average consumer. Take a picture of a menu, advertisement, etc and scan it.
A Second Snap
There are a lot of things we like about Prizmo, and while a lot of users will find that it’s just not the right solution, Prizmo grew on us. Prizmo is a lot easier to use then many of the other OCR Applications that are available and it does what it’s supposed to. Simply drag an image, make some changes: straighten, brightness, contrast, distortion and crop. Then it’s ready to scan. And if you took the picture perfectly, no need to bother, just scan in one of the ten languages Prizmo can recognize.
In Closing
Prizmo is cheaper then a lot of other OCR Applications, OmniPage and Readiris start at $149 and $129 respectively, Prizmo is $39.95. By the same token, Prizmo does a lot less – particularly those two large features. Additionally Prizmo wasn’t as successful as we would have thought it could have been scanning some images. We think Prizmo is a novel idea, but we don’t really see a need to pay for an application we don’t see a real need for. In fact, we really can’t think of an ideal situation to use Prizo or when we have ever needed it. Prizmo can be purchased directly from Creaceed for $39.95. We give Creaceed 2.0/5 stars largely because we can’t find a real need for the application, there are plenty of others that disagree with our notion and maybe you are different then us, but paying for something we don’t need doesn’t make us happy, no matter how pretty your UI is.
TheMacFeed gives Creaceed’s Prizmo 2/5 stars
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