Hewlett-Packard Company Selects Caere OCR for Entire ScanJet 4 Product Family; OmniPage Lite and OmniPage Limited Edition Provide Highly Accurate OCR Technology for Basic OCR Needs and Offer an Inexpensive Upgrade Path to OmniPage Pro

Business Wire, Nov 1, 1995

LOS GATOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 1, 1995--Caere Corporation (NASDAQ:CAER) today announced that its has partnered with Hewlett-Packard Company in an OEM agreement that provides Caere's optical character recognition (OCR) technology in the entire line of the just-announced ScanJet 4 product family.

The agreement partners the worldwide leader in desktop scanners with the leader in OCR. Caere's OCR technology allows users to turn paper-based information into computer-editable text by processing scanned or faxed information and converting it to actual text that can be used in word processing, spreadsheet, and other text-based applications. Under the agreement, Caere is providing OEM versions of its award-winning OmniPage product - OmniPage Lite and OmniPage Limited Edition. The HP ScanJet 4s and the HP ScanJet 4Si include OmniPage Lite, and the HP ScanJet 4c includes OmniPage Limited Edition. The agreement includes Windows and Macintosh HP ScanJet 4 Series scanners sold in North America, Western Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific.

"The new ScanJet 4 scanners provide the tools for more effective sharing and distribution of information", said Doug McCord, general manager of HP's Greeley Hardcopy Division. "OCR technology continues to be a vital component of the solution that HP provides for our customers. We selected Caere's OmniPage Lite and OmniPage Limited Edition because of Caere's proven OCR technology."

OmniPage Lite and OmniPage Limited Edition

OmniPage Lite and OmniPage Limited Edition provide highly accurate OCR capabilities to meet the needs of users with basic OCR requirements. OmniPage Lite is an OCR engine that is integrated into the PaperPort paper management software that is also included with the HP ScanJet 4 Series scanners. With OmniPage Lite, users can simply drag scanned pages onto the "OCR" icon, which invokes OmniPage Lite and converts the pages to editable text. OmniPage Limited Edition is an OCR "applet" that includes basic OCR functionality. With OmniPage Limited Edition users can load images from a scanner or hard drive and take advantage of features such as zoom, rotate, add zone, and other base-level OCR capabilities. The converted text can then be saved into text-based applications like Word, WordPerfect for Windows, and Excel.

"By providing OCR capabilities in the ScanJet 4 product line, we are exposing an enormous number of scanner users to the time and money savings of OCR," said Chad Kinzelberg, Caere's vice president of marketing. "OmniPage Lite and OmniPage Limited Edition have been designed to offer simple OCR capabilities and let scanner users try OCR first hand, in order to evaluate its usefulness, without any additional investment up front." For users who decide that they want more robust OCR capabilities including higher accuracy and ease of use features, Caere makes upgrading easy and affordable. Caere offers upgrade packages to its full-featured OmniPage Pro in the retail channel for only $129, (estimated street price).

OmniPage Pro 6.0 for Windows and OmniPage Pro 5.0 for Macintosh

OmniPage Lite and OmniPage Limited Edition are only two products in Caere's extensive OCR product family. Caere also offers OmniPage Pro that provides more robust capabilities in an easier to use application. Caere's top-of-the-line OCR application, OmniPage Pro provides extented capabilities over the OEM versions including:

- Caere's newest OCR engine for increased accuracy;

- AutoOCR Toolbar that performs all the key steps of the OCR process automatically with a single mouse click;

- Superior accuracy on degraded documents such as photocopies and faxes;

- Text proofing for faster job completion;

- True Page technology that maintains the original format of the page including text and graphics to reduce the number of editing steps;

- Deferred/batch processing to delay recognition to a more convenient time;

- Advanced OCR settings panel for greater precision and accuracy; and others.

HP ScanJet 3 and 4 Series scanner owners who wish to upgrade to the top-of-the-line OCR products can do so by purchasing Caere's retail upgrade packages, OmniPage Pro 6.0 for Windows and OmniPage Pro 5.0 for Macintosh. Caere has lowered the price of the retail upgrade packages to $129 from $149 (estimated street price). The upgrade pricing represents more than a $350 reduction in the cost of OmniPage Pro and is available to any WordScan or OmniPage owner who either purchased Caere OCR as a stand alone application or received the free software bundled with most scanners. Note: Upgrade pricing may vary outside the United States.

Caere today also announced (in a separate release) OmniPage Pro for Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 4Si version 6.0. The new product includes a site license for 20 users, 2 sets of User Manuals, and 1 set of diskettes for owners of the HP ScanJet 4Si. The street price is expected to be $1,495.

Caere Corporation

Caere Corporation, with U.S. headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif. and European headquarters, Caere GmbH, in Munich, Germany, is the leader in OCR technology and a leading provider of desktop document management and form processing products. Caere has expanded its line of OCR products as a result of the December 1994 merger with Calera Recognition Systems. Caere's products include the OmniPage and WordScan lines of OCR software that convert printed and faxed documents into electronic text; the PageKeeper line of Windows document management software that effortlessly retrieves a wide range of information from virtually any source; OmniForm, which converts paper forms to electronic format; the M/Series high-speed, high-volume OCR hardware and software for commercial applications; and a broad array of OCR and bar code readers that accelerate transaction processing.