Review: CardScan Personal and Executive

I've always been wary of business card readers. The theory behind them is simple; you your business cards (and some of us can get a lot of them) through a specially-made scanner. An OCR (optical character recognition) program turns the image into readable text, separates out the name, company, address, etc. so that you can either use it as an address list, or send it to Outlook or another contact programs.

At least, that's the theory. However, I usually found business card readers more trouble than they were worth. I spent more time correcting errors than I would have taken actually typing the addresses. The latest Cardscan scanners/software packages, however, have changed my mind.

Two Versions

The CardScan Executive and Personal are the latest versions of the company's business card readers. The CardScan Personal is small, more portable (it even comes with a small carrying bat, and has a small door protecting the scanner area), and slightly more limited. It only scans in monochrome (grayscale), and has a maximum speed of 5 seconds for a card.

The Executive version is a bit bigger -- unlike the Personal, it is meant to be a desktop model. It scans in both color and grayscale with a maximum speed of 3 seconds per card. (A third version, CardScan Team, offers the same hardware and software as Executive, but is shareable among employees.)

Both the Personal and Executive scanners work well, and are easy to use. You just push the card gently into the scan slot and either will grab it and pull it though with aplomb. While I found the color scanning abilities of the Executive scanner were fun, the scanner worked faster if you scanned in grayscale (and the images took up less space on the hard drive -- which could be important if you tend to collect as many cards as I do).

Impressive Software

While the hardware works nicely, I was particularly impressed with the CardScan software. Interestingly, the first thing that comes up when you install the software is a message from Peter Weyman, president of CardScan, saying that if anything goes wrong within the first month, they'll take back the device with no questions; and also include a two-year hardware warranty. It's a very civilized way to start an install.

Once the software is installed, all you have to do is plug your scanner into a USB. Put a business card in the scan slot, and it will automatically bring up the CardScan application. If you've got several cards to scan, you can just keep feeding them into the scanner -- the software collects each image until you're finished. Hit the "Process" button, and CardScan will start the OCR (optical character recognition) procedure for all the cards.

The only thing that could slow you up is if you want to scan the back of a card (which I often do, since that's where I scribble notes about the contact). In that case, you need to scan the back immediately after, and then process both sides so that they can be associated.

For some views of the CardScan software, check out our Image Gallery

The software processes each card quickly and cleanly. I was really surprised at how well it translated each line on the card and placed them into the right fields: name, telephone number, e-mail, etc. Any text on the card that the software couldn't figure out a place for was dropped into a field called "Other."

There were, of course, a few cards that gave the software a bit of trouble, but it the percentage of errors was really very small.

The main purpose of CardScan, of course, is to collect all the information in a contact list, and if you don't have another contact manager, you could do worse than CardScan. Each entry not only shows your contact information, but front and (if you want it, back) images of your cards, along a place for notes and a list of categories.