ABBYY OCR Software

The paperless office is great in theory but in practice it can be hard to convert large amounts of paper to electronic format.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software should be unobtrusive and fast. FineReader 8 is both and includes several methods of speeding up the scanning process.

One useful feature is the ability to use Microsoft Word's custom dictionary, while the ability to recognise text from digital photographs is good for any researcher.

ABBYY, however, recommends that a 5-megapixel camera is used, and two megapixels is the minimum recommendation.

The software also includes some image manipulation routines to straighten text lines for digital photos.

FineReader is not cheap but it's a very comprehensive OCR suite that works well and the camera options make it more than just a niche product.