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.
