At a glance
What is it? Portable Business Card Scanner
Price £30
The good Size and value
The bad Performance
We say
The cheapest and smallest business card scanner we have ever seen,
but what compromises must be made to save that money?
Full review
30 March 2007 - You might not think that a business card
scanner is for you, after all they are usually rather bulky, rather
expensive and unless you are a business person travelling around and
shaking hands with suits then you won’t have anything to scan in the
first place.
However, while the cost and size thing is usually true, when we received
the tiny 106 x 52 x 25mm USB powered ColorPage BR600, the world’s
smallest card scanner, and discovered that you can find it online for a
tad under £30 we had to sit up and take notice.
The truth is that, thanks to those dirt cheap internet business card
services and card printers located at railway stations and airports,
huge numbers of people are carrying them now. It is no longer just a
business thing, and more a "look at me I am just like a posh old
Victorian lady" type of affair.
Of course, whether you are a professional salesman collecting dozens of
cards every week, or an amateur Victorian lady collecting a couple a
month, you could always just add the details to your contacts database
manually and be done with it. But why should you when you can let a
machine slave do it for you, especially at this price?
Well, a couple of reasons spring to mind after using the somewhat
ironically named ColorPage scanner (it doesn’t scan in colour at all,
just greyscale): reason numero uno is the fact that of the 100 business
cards of all shapes and sizes, designs and styles, that we scanned only
91 of them were automatically transferred into the Cardiris 3.5 BCR
software contacts database.
This is because 2 of the cards were simply too big, the scanner accepts
a maximum card size of 54.19 x 90.42mm which shouldn’t really be a
problem as very few business cards are larger than A8, we were just
unlucky to have met with some huge egos in our travels.
A much bigger problem is the fact that if your card is "over
designed" in that it has lots of patterns or colours or pictures it
just confuses the OCR software which doesn’t find any text.
At least, if it does find text it gets it wrong. This was particularly
noticeable with cards that featured heavy striping and, for some reason,
the colour green as a background.
Reason numero duo is that the software wasn’t that brilliant at
recognising URLs and business names from corporate logos.
However, to put that into perspective, that was only a 9% failure rate
of which half were scanned but the details needed a little manual
tweaking, which leaves 91% of our attempts scanning perfectly, with all
the necessary contact details being transferred into a contacts database
in no time at all.
Each card took approximately 10 seconds to scan and transfer all the
details via the OCR software. Not exactly a slow performance it has to
be said, especially considering this is just a USB1.1 device. Talking of
which, there is no external power source, no batteries, to worry about
adding weight or bulk to the scanner as it draws its power through that
USB connection.
Given that the thing is so small, so cute in its blue livery, and does a
none too shabby job for the money, we have to say that we were a lot
more impressed with this than we thought we would be.
“There’s so much inventory out there that the buyer can pick and choose,” said Susan Sirles Fidler, a Realtor at Re/Max 10, Oak Lawn. But she cautioned, “The stuff that’s almost free is almost free because it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg to put it back together. It’s not buyer beware as much as buyer be smart.”
