I belong to a number of good online community forums designed for computer technology. All of them have excellent hardware forums, but when it comes to the software end of things I find much to be desired. It is hard to find good review sites. I need something that has honest user reviews much like IW members reviews of games. I'll take your opinions over a gaming magazine or website's opinions any day

Here is the thing: I am looking for good Optical Character Recognition (OCR)software. This is the type that you use with your scanner and you can copy text, documents, PDFs, etc., edit said text documents and convert to a Word.doc, Excel, Power Point,PDF, etc.

I have looked at OmniPage 15 both Standard and Pro versions. The Standard is $99.00 while the Pro is $400. It is very popular BUT the thing is I have read far too many actual users spread out across internet space who give this a Big Thumbs Down.

I looked at ABBYY Fine Reader and this seems to be the strong choice of experienced people. The thing is they have a very limited version for $50 but it doesn't do what I want. The next jump is the PRO version at over $400.

So in my quest to find an OCR there is a derth of reviews on OCR software. Please recommend me some solid software review sites with community members. if you can recommend a decent OCR without breaking the bank I would be appreciative. Thanks!

What features in ABBY Fine Reader do you find to be missing?

Not ABBYY Fine Reader Pro 8.0 That is excellent product, but cost wise way out of my league. The limited version doesn't mention anything about text editing which i will need.

I thought you meant something else since you mentioned the 400$. According to me here http://buy.abbyy.com/content/frpro/default.aspx it costs only 129 Euro.

I think that might be the upgrade version.

no. the upgrade version is 89Euro. That's new version for 129.

where did you get the 400$ price from?