Seeking opinions on business card scanners/readers/organizers

[gore_bu...@yahoo.com]

I am considering getting a card scanner for professional networking
during a career transition. My cards are getting unmanagable;
regardless if whether I organize them by organization or person, there
will be some hunting around. Better to be able to search an
electronic database. I've listed the options I've found below. Very
little in the way of comparisons, aside from Amazon & PC World
(http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,112741,00.asp). I am
tempted to restrict myself to one of the top 4 in the list i.e. IRIS
IBCR or Corex Cardscan. What are some opinions of people who have
used these (hopefully more than one, though that is not likely)?

The reviews of #3 seems to be the best, but it's also the priciest.
Amazon also indicates that most people go for this after reviewing
their pages. #4 is a nonbusiness variation, which is in the same
price range as #1 (which also seems to be popular); how do #1 & #4
compare?

>From http://www.cardscan-canada.com/html/compare.html, the difference
between #2 & #3 seems to be that #2 is smaller; have people found the
functional difference to be neglegible?

Compared to #2 & #3, #4 scans only B&W, and has restricted software
functionality. I'm inclined to say that color is unimportant when
using such a database; is this what people find? How do you find
the restricted software functionality?

Thanks for your opinions. If it matters, I'm using Palm Desktop with
Palm Pilot. I am also interested in how well the software recognizes
data in the various fields of a contact record from the business card,
how easy it is to correct it, and card jamming potential. #1 seems to
have positive reviews about that.

1. IRIS Business Card Reader (IBCR) II (color)
Amazon $133
Amazon: 3 stars
PCworld: 2.5 stars

2. Corex Cardscan Executive 600cx (color)
$182

3. Corex Cardscan Executive 700 (color)
Amazon $220
Smaller than 600cx
PCworld: 3.5 stars

4. Corex Personal Business Card Scanner (B&W)
Amazon $131

5. Alestron PenPower WorldCard Office 5
PCworld: 3 stars

6. Macally BIZSCAN Business Card Reader

7. WORLDCARD Office Card Scan -Eng By ALESTRON INC

8. Targus
Poor reviews from Amazon

9. NIMCARD Express Business Card Reader/ Organizer

10. FutureDial SnapScan

11. E-Book Systems, Inc.: Micro3 Business Card Reader

12. Thakral Color Business Card Scanner

[jcd...@gmail.com]

Sme...@fish.net wrote:
> I am considering getting a card scanner for professional networking
> during a career transition. My cards are getting unmanagable;
> regardless if whether I organize them by organization or person, there
> will be some hunting around. Better to be able to search an
> electronic database. I've listed the options I've found below.

<snip>

> 5. Alestron PenPower WorldCard Office 5
> PCworld: 3 stars

I was just hired to do some computer tasks for a small office, they had
recently bought this card scanner. We scanned in the cards then
exported the scan into a format that could be read by Excel so we could
add a column (for the category) and then imported the cards into ACT.
The whole system worked *very* smoothly and I was very impressed with
the card scanner's ability to read and parse the data off of a wide
variety of cards.

I have no info on how well it integrates with Palm, but I'll find out
in the upcoming weeks and report back.

jc

[gore_bu...@yahoo.com]

Thanks, JC.

[gore_bu...@yahoo.com]

I forgot to add that being able to scan a soft copy of a "card" would
also be a valuable feature. For example, I have some cards securely
taped to a sheet of notes. I don't want to have to cut out the card to
scan it in. I want to use my flat-bed scanner to scan the page, then
use software packages to crop out everything but the card, and finally
generate a PDF, GIF, or PNG for the card scanner software to scan --
successfully, hopefully.

[Danny]

Take a look at
www.fcpa.com/products/scanners/scansnap-5110EOx2/features.html or run a
googleseach on fi-5110eox2 . This scanner is great for scanning
business cards and automatically OCR-ing into any backend database that
you choose (i.e. ACT, Outlook, etc...) but, it also is ideal for
document imaging.

Just take a look... for the pricerange, you can't match it's
performance...
Pros:
15ppm
two CCD's - 600dpi true optical
usb 2.0 - backwards compatible w 1.1
ABBYY OCR engine embeded
ideal for users starting out with digital archiving or document
imaging...
duty cycle: 750/ pages per day
1 yr warranty
mac version in beta-testing already...

cons:
not twain compliant
not isis compliant

[Danny]

[jcd...@gmail.com]

If you can't find one that does soft-scanning, just photocopy your
taped cards then cut and scan the copies.

jc

[gore_bu...@yahoo.com]

Danny wrote:
> Take a look at
> www.fcpa.com/products/scanners/scansnap-5110EOx2/features.html or
> run a googleseach on fi-5110eox2 . This scanner is great for
> scanning business cards and automatically OCR-ing into any backend
> database that you choose (i.e. ACT, Outlook, etc...) but, it also is
> ideal for document imaging.

<snip>

> cons:
> not twain compliant
> not isis compliant

Hi, Danny,

There isn't a whole lot of info about its OCR ability, and accuracy in
recognizing data for the different fields of an organizer. Nor is
there pricing info. Do you have this model? Can you comment on this
information? Thanks.

BTW, is noncompliance to TWAIN and ISIS a big deal? What difficulties
can arise from that?

[gore_bu...@yahoo.com]

jcd...@gmail.com wrote:
> Sme...@fish.net wrote:
> > ...being able to scan a soft copy of a "card" would also be a

> > valuable feature. For example, I have some cards securely taped
> > to a sheet of notes. I don't want to have to cut out the card to
> > scan it in. I want to use my flat-bed scanner to scan the page,
> > then use software packages to crop out everything but the card,
> > and finally generate a PDF, GIF, or PNG for the card scanner
> > software to scan
>

> If you can't find one that does soft-scanning, just photocopy your
> taped cards then cut and scan the copies.

Great idea. Thanks.

[Danny]

Hello Sme...@fish.net,

Without getting too much into the details of the technology, the OCR
process is occuring on all scans when using the ScanSnap. If scanning
business cards, the paper guides on the chute assembly (input tray) are
retracted together (like a fax machine) to the size of your smallest
business cards. When talking about the benefits of the scanner, it's
probably easier to look at it as 3 seperate components:
1. mechanics- paper handling or pulling documents quickly and reliably.
a scanner which only feeds 4 pages per minute wouldn't benefit anyone
with a busy schedule if they had to sit by the scanner and wait 25
minutes to scan in 100 pages or in this case, business cards. If
there's data on both sides of the document/card, that time would double
to 50 minues. With a duplex scanner capable of capturing 15
pages/minute, you'd be able to scan that same batch in less than 5
minutes.. That's when the potential of the scanner begins to really
make sense... because you're not just limited to business cards.
Anything you currently file (invoices, mortgage documents, reciepts,
etc...) can be digitally archived for safe keeping and quick retrieval.

but to answer your question in a nutshell, business cards are scaned in
using the Cardminder application (included with the scanner ) The
Cardminder by itself would be a good solution in itself. But, if you
alreay have another Contacts application in place (ie. Outlook, ACT!,
Access, Excel, etc... ) Cardminder would export that data directly into
your application...

As the end user, you wouldn't have to worry about enabling OCR every
time you wanted to index your images because the OCR is alway occurring
with candminder. Like people, not all OCR engines are the same. OCR is
only a recognition of characters within a digital picture. If the
digital picture is poor, the OCR engine may fail to regognise which
letter the data resembles. Just like the human eye. One of the industry
leaders known for their OCR technolgy is a company called ABBYY. If you
do a lookup on their technology, you'll see that they have one of the
most respected and reliable engines available. There's only a handful
of different engines widely used in workgroup imaging environments
(less than 1000 scans per day) None are better for the cost.

Twain is a communication protocol allowing your software to communicate
with the scanner hardware. twain compliant applications are common
because it's non-proprietary for the software vendor. ISIS is a
proprietary protocol by Pixel translations geared more towards
enterprise scanning environments. Traditionally, a higher performance
driver for volume scannning . The ScanSnap's non-compliance with both
protocols disqualifies it as being the right solution ONLY if you're
currently using a software package which requires the scanner to be
compliant with either driver. (there are work arounds still- like file
imports)
I don't want to confuse you with too much information however... if you
ever have any questions, feel free to call me direct at 408-894-3682.

pricing: Fujitsu scanners are not found through retail centers like
Staples or BestBuy.. they're only available via distribution channels.
Your best bet to get the best cost is simply type in fi-5110eox2 or
scansnap! in google. List price from Fujitsu is $495. Actual costs
you'll see are much less, often in the $300 range.

[gore_bu...@yahoo.com]

Danny wrote:
> Without getting too much into the details of the technology, the OCR
> process is occuring on all scans when using the ScanSnap. If scanning
> business cards, the paper guides on the chute assembly (input tray) are
> retracted together (like a fax machine) to the size of your smallest
> business cards. When talking about the benefits of the scanner, it's
> probably easier to look at it as 3 seperate components:
> 1. mechanics- paper handling or pulling documents quickly and reliably.
> a scanner which only feeds 4 pages per minute wouldn't benefit anyone
> with a busy schedule if they had to sit by the scanner and wait 25
> minutes to scan in 100 pages or in this case, business cards. If
> there's data on both sides of the document/card, that time would double
> to 50 minues. With a duplex scanner capable of capturing 15
> pages/minute, you'd be able to scan that same batch in less than 5
> minutes.. That's when the potential of the scanner begins to really
> make sense... because you're not just limited to business cards.
> Anything you currently file (invoices, mortgage documents, reciepts,
> etc...) can be digitally archived for safe keeping and quick retrieval.

OK, thanks. I just need it for business cards. And I'm doing
personal networking, so I don't have that many cards at once, most
being single-sided. In fact, I have software that does OCR, so I'm
more focused on the ability of the software to pick out the OCR'd data
and put it into the right fields of the organizer -- particularly the
percentage of the time that it gets this right.

> but to answer your question in a nutshell, business cards are scaned in
> using the Cardminder application (included with the scanner ) The
> Cardminder by itself would be a good solution in itself. But, if you
> alreay have another Contacts application in place (ie. Outlook, ACT!,
> Access, Excel, etc... ) Cardminder would export that data directly into
> your application...

Hopefully, including Palm Desktop. About the software being
stand-alone solution, that's sounds intriguing. I could use the
scanner I already have to make an image, then use the standalone
OCR to put the right data into the right fields of the organizer.
Finally, I'd export it to Palm Desktop. Can it be used this way?

> As the end user, you wouldn't have to worry about enabling OCR every
> time you wanted to index your images because the OCR is alway occurring
> with candminder. Like people, not all OCR engines are the same. OCR is
> only a recognition of characters within a digital picture. If the
> digital picture is poor, the OCR engine may fail to regognise which
> letter the data resembles. Just like the human eye. One of the industry
> leaders known for their OCR technolgy is a company called ABBYY. If you
> do a lookup on their technology, you'll see that they have one of the
> most respected and reliable engines available. There's only a handful
> of different engines widely used in workgroup imaging environments
> (less than 1000 scans per day) None are better for the cost.
>
> Twain is a communication protocol allowing your software to communicate
> with the scanner hardware. twain compliant applications are common
> because it's non-proprietary for the software vendor. ISIS is a
> proprietary protocol by Pixel translations geared more towards
> enterprise scanning environments. Traditionally, a higher performance
> driver for volume scannning . The ScanSnap's non-compliance with both
> protocols disqualifies it as being the right solution ONLY if you're
> currently using a software package which requires the scanner to be
> compliant with either driver. (there are work arounds still- like file
> imports)

Thanks for the explanation of TWAIN & ISIS -- I actually didn't want
to use up your time defining them (I looked them up). I was kind of
wondering what the impact in terms of usage would be. If the scanner
comes with its own software, why would one worry about another piece
of software requiring TWAIN compliance?

> I don't want to confuse you with too much information however... if you
> ever have any questions, feel free to call me direct at 408-894-3682.

Thanks, I may take up your offer.

> pricing: Fujitsu scanners are not found through retail centers like
> Staples or BestBuy.. they're only available via distribution channels.
> Your best bet to get the best cost is simply type in fi-5110eox2 or
> scansnap! in google. List price from Fujitsu is $495. Actual costs
> you'll see are much less, often in the $300 range.

Thanks again. That's a bit on the high side, more than the Corex
business model. But I'll keep it in mind.