CardScan Executive 700 Compact Business Card Scanner Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I am glad I purchased my Cardscan 700, but there are some significant unfortunate missed opportunities and because of that some important functions cannot be done at all. My impression is that this is the best product on the market, due to its scanning properties, which are quite good. There are some serious deficiencies though in the rest of the software which would be nice to have fixed, and which in some cases render the device somewhat useless, since the output cannot be transferred to a useful place.
PROs: It does a pretty good job of scanning. The algorithm is well developed and is actually quite impressive. Even cards that catch and rotate as they go through, producing a funny smeared image, have some of their contents scanned correctly. The superiority of this recognition software is the strong point of this product. There is also an ok database management product that one can use to maintain and look up cards. Operationally the product is especially nice- I can just sit there feeding cards in and typing carriage return after each one, glancing at the screen to catch errors. The card image is retained in the record in the Cardscan database, which is important.
CONs: 1) the exit path has places that cards can hang up, and they can catch as they go through. This happens fairly often unless the card is new and flat, so part of the operation is to try to prevent that, by straightening out bent corners ahead of time, and by adding a little force keep the card from catching and rotating as one corner goes forward and the other is stuck. Quite needless- if the exit path was smooth and continuous, this wouldn't happen - the problem is in the rear of the plastic case. 2) Although the product retains the image of the business card, there's no way to pass that through to Outlook or export it to any other format. This is very unfortunate. I could laboriously do that by hand by cutting and pasting each one, except that Cardscan software does not permit copy / paste functions on the image. Why not? It's easy to implement. 3) Every time I start the program it harasses me about registering, even though I've been specific that I do not wish to. It also harasses me about logging in the online backup facility even though I've asked it not to do that. It therefore ignores the user wishes. 4) The data exchange function allows only extremely crude export to a file, in a simple text or csv format. There is no way to create an Outlook format .pst file, which would simplify importing, and allow for the future option of including an image. Outlook can hold an image in the comment section of the record, but apparently Cardscan folks aren't even close to thinking about this. 5) If I indicate that a data export for a file is destined for Outlook, the field names are not set up correctly, so unless I do some heavy editing of field names, nothing much other than the contact name gets across. If I export directly to the running Outlook program, it isn't perfect, but it's close enough to be usable. Why did Cardscan get one right and not the other?? In neither case can I send the card image over. 6) I was forced to install Microsoft .NET software even though I intended to do all my exports via files. I didn't get a choice- if I didn't install .NET, the installer stopped and exited without installing any Cardscan software.

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CardScan Executive 700 offers the world's fastest scanning speed, full compatibility with every popular contact program and portable device, and advanced features like color scanning, your contacts on the Web, fail-safe backup and a contact information updating service.

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