Business Card Scanners

April 29, 2005 8:26 AM

I'm looking for a business card scanner for a friend, anybody have experience with these?

I'm looking for a card scanner that can work with Access and Outlook but I have no experience with business card scanners at all. Web searches yield a lot of hits, but I can't get many reviews and I'd like personal experiences if anybody has any.

posted by crazy finger to technology (4 comments total)

Look at CardScan. Works with Outlook, I know that for sure. Not sure about Access. This product is a local favorite in my office. It works real well.
posted by bDiddy at 10:23 AM on April 29, 2005

While we're at it, does anyone know of business card scanner that works with Mac OS X?
posted by alms at 11:16 AM on April 29, 2005

The CardScan line works better than one would expect but not as well as I'd like. Then again, I am a crank. It has a pretty good API too, though oddly you have to pay for it. ("Hi, I'd like to write some code that makes your device more useful and desirable to people so they might want to buy it even more." "Okay, but it'll cost ya.")

I guess it beats typing stuff in but I may be biased since 99% of the cards I get I can barely wait till the person turns away before I throw it away. If you're dealing with commonly laid-out cards it does a very good job guessing the field and OCRing the data in it. Artsy fartsy stuff less so and colored & pattered backgrounds make it take longer to correct the problems than just key it by hand.
posted by phearlez at 1:24 PM on April 29, 2005

I have the CardScan Executive 700 and the CardScan Personal business card scanners (both by Corex). The difference in hardware is not worth the price (to me). One feeds the cards vertically, one feeds the cards horizontally (basically. One has a cute blue arrow, the other does not). The software, however, made all the difference between the two (for what we use it for)

I have no complaints about either of them. The accuracy of the software is pretty good, all things considered. It picks up about 80-90% of the text from a business card. I like the software that comes with the executive card reader better because it integrates easily in to our preferred customer database format. The personal software has limited data exchange capabilities. Because of the number of cards we scan, the executive version that allowed for exporting in the format we use made our sales people very happy.
posted by schnee at 4:58 PM on April 29, 2005