CardScan 500

For many professions, the exchanging of business cards is an essential part of the typical working week. While innocuous enough on their own, they can soon grow to an unmanageable stack. This usually happens before their electronic transfer, by which time the prospect has become less than tempting. Enter Cortex Technologies with its CardScan 500, an OCR device designed to do the hard work for you.

The CardScan 500 bundle comprises OCR software and a small black scanning device about the size of an answering machine. PC connection is via the parallel port or USB if you have Windows 98 or 2000.

An excellent software introduction takes you through all the steps required to get going within a few minutes. Each card is scanned and processed in about ten seconds and then transferred to the contact-management software supplied. The accuracy of recognition depends greatly on the complexity and design of the card scanned, but apart from the odd element of data in the wrong field and misreading the occasional difficult character, results were excellent.

I was most impressed by the software's ability to recognise some accented letters, such as the û in Bûblingen, Germany. It also correctly distinguished between different contact numbers such as mobile, direct line and so on. It fared less well with business cards that strayed from standard formats. Nevertheless, if the text on the business card is printed in portrait, the software rotates the scanned image to read the text properly.

Overall, you'll find that the process of scanning, correcting and optionally transferring the contact to your selected software package, such as Microsoft Outlook, will usually take less than a minute. There's also the ability to synchronise with Windows CE-based PDAs, Palms and Psions using the Intellisync software supplied with the scanner.

Scanned cards can be given a category, such as 'business' or 'customer' and the software will let you sort and search entries based on their categories. You can also do a quick search, either through all categories or by a selected category such as 'name' or 'company'. This is an efficient way of managing the entries and even with a fairly hefty collection of scanned business cards, navigation proved simple. The program also has tabs that allow you to email entries directly or even make a phone call to them, providing you have a modem installed.

The CardScan 500 is an effective way of transferring business cards into PC-based contact management systems. The software works well and the ability to synchronise to handheld devices, as well as transfer entries to other contact management software, all add to the unit's usefulness. At £170 it certainly isn't cheap and for the same money you could buy a reasonable scanner and the CardScan OCR software, which, although more time consuming, would still work. Having said that, £170 for a discretely-sized device is reasonable and you'd be surprised at the number of people in the office likely to make use of it.

Author: Gareth Ogden