CardScan Personal v8 Card Scanner | Cardscan for Home Office users

CardScan Personal v8 Card Scanner | CardScan Review-Bill Dubovsky for Bits & Bytes, SI Business Trends

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CardScan Personal ...

	CardScan Personal v8 Card Scanner CardScan CardScan, 2006 average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Over 40% of CardScan's customers rely on CardScane as their primary contact manager. CardScan has made over a dozen enhancements to the software to create an even more advanced contact management solution. The software is even more intelligently designed and delivers what you need and expect.

Cardscan for Home Office users

I selected the Cardscan 60 for my home office needs. I had a large pile of cards that I did not have the patience to enter into Outlook.

I run Vista and had some initial problems loading the software under the AutoRun process. I had to restart the installation and then opened the files on the disk and then manually selected the .exe program to begin installation. This worked.

Once the software was installed the program works very well. The scanner is rated at a little slower than the larger models but frankly I don't think it is money well spent. The scan speed of the 60 is fine for my needs. I processed over 100 cards in 20 minutes including edit checks...

Cardscan synchs very well with Outlook 2003 which I use as my contact DB.

I did notice as other users have reported that the scanner seems to stop feeding cards after 15 or so inserts...not sure why but when I lifted the scanner and tilted it back while holding the card in place, the scanner began to operate and accepted the cards. I emailed Cardscan and they gave a number for me to call which I will do this week.

It seems to read all standard US and European cards styles very well. It cannot read company names if part of logos or wild font styles. It's accuracy is about 80% meaning you will have to go back and check and edit some cards as they are processed.

Definitely worth the cost and saves lots of time and keeps my database current.

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CardScan Review-Bill Dubovsky for Bits & Bytes, SI Business Trends

CardScan Personal Card Scanner. - Bill Dubovsky, S.I. Business Trends, "Bits & Bytes," July, 2008.

Situation: You have just been to a meeting, trade show or business mixer and have a slew of new business cards. You put a rubber band around them and promise yourself to enter them into Outlook, ACT!, Goldmine or other contact manager and follow up with each contact. In many cases the only time you will touch those cards a second time is when the rubber band decomposes and the cards are all over your desk drawer. If only there was an easy way to get that information into your computer, smart phone or PDA data base without having to re-enter each card! That solution may be here.

What is it? The CardScan personal is a small USB connected and powered scanner that you can take on the road, scan in each business card, and have it saved as an image, an address card file, or synchronize with most of the major contact data bases and smart phones. The system I reviewed is the CardScan personal by CardScan, Inc., about $153 on Amazon.com.

How it works: You first install the software which is provided on a CD-ROM. Next you attach the cord from the small scanner to a USB port on your computer, and start up the software. You follow directions to set-up and align the scanner.

To scan in a business card, just feed them into the scanner which is a little larger than an eye glass case. It feeds each card through one at a time, taking only a few seconds per card. Once they're in, you can review the actual card (on the bottom half of the screen) with the text (on the top of the screen). At that point you can check for errors or missing info and add it or move it as you would with any text editor. When you're satisfied with the text you click on "verify" and the business card data goes into a data base. You can also classify a card as to prospect, vendor, etc. and you can de-dup the list looking for doubles of cards. Editing can be in the "drag and drop" mode, reducing the chance for mistakes, or you can delete or add your own information, comments, or notes at that time.

You can actually use the CardScan software as your data base and print out your card information in many formats. You can even just print out a page with the actual card images on them (if you have cards with photos on them) and you can use the data in a mail merge function or even create mailing labels from them.

Other features include a quick search function, one-click emailing, creating mailing labels with a DYMO LabelWriter Printer (automatic connect), synch with your other database software and "safeguard" which allows you to back up and save a copy of your data on-line so if your computer crashes or you lose your PDA or smart phone, you can always retrieve your contact data.

What you need: Microsoft Windows XP or Windows 2000, a Pentium or later processor, 64 MB or RAM and 90 MB - 120 MB of hard-disk space. The CardScan personal scanner comes with all software, hardware and cables you need to connect to your computer.

How hard is it to use? I connected my CardScan scanner to my MacBook Pro, using the Bootcamp Windows XP partition and got it working within 10 minutes.

Findings: It worked as advertized. I always like to check the users' comments and reviews in Amazon before I buy anything, as they seem to be an honest assessment of what you can expect.

Pros: It actually worked better than I thought it would. Standard business cards worked the best, while "artsy" cards with unusual type fonts did poorly. It really got me to take notice of the design of people's business cards. I found that the more professional cards, from more established businesses, scanned easily with little or no corrections necessary. Amateurish cards with lots of text and graphics didn't do as well. They were even hard to read when I reviewed them visually! The CardScan software also allows you to scan the backs of the cards and keep the both sides together.

It was convenient enough to export the information to my contact manager, ACT!, and to make address cards for Mac's Address Book, which could be stored on an iPhone. CardScan also markets a similar scanning system for tracking business receipts and expenses.

Cons: Because people's cards are so diverse in design and layout, I had to review each card for accuracy. While editing and "drag and dropping" data from one field to another is easier and less time consuming than entering all the data into the database, it's not automatic.

Bottom-line: I was impressed at the software's ability to handle the job and felt that the price was a fair value. It actually worked better than I thought it would and I would recommend the unit for businesses or organizations who collect a lot of business cards, especially after business shows. The unit also has other features and functions which I don't need at the current time, but appear to be useful and impressive, especially for people who don't use contact management software.[...]

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Worth it, but have reasonable expectations

Let me give some background to this. I'm an intern this summer and I was asked by my boss to get 300+ business cards on the computer and in his Microsoft Outlook address book. This is where I turned (Amazon has the lowest price on this good from anywhere by far).

The good things....
-It was an easy set up
-The software is very friendly and easy to convert to excel or outlook
-The system makes mistakes but its not very hard to go through and check each business card after everything is scanned. The software keeps track of which cards you "verify" which is a nice check on the occasional mistakes that the machine makes. It also shows you the image of the business card that you scanned when you correct the info.
-It impressively tells the difference between phone numbers, fax numbers, and cell phones, direct lines. Everything.

The cons
-Its not super easy to feed cards into all the time. I'd have a streak where I would place the card in the feeder and it would go through no problem, and then that would stop and i'd have to fiddle with how I was feeding in the card. Not a big deal, and you quickly get used to the process.

All in all it saved me a ton of time and got the job done for me. It can do the same for you.

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Card sensor is problematic

Reader did not reliably sense insertion of card. Called Cardscan (CS) customer service. Was on infinite hold. Returned to Amazon for replacement. Replacement had same insertion issue and drive motor made lots of noise. Returned replacement. CS sent me email saying to insert at angle; helped a little. Card sensor is an issue. When it senses card, it works (scan/OCR) fine.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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