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The Corex CardScan Executive 500 is an ingenious device designed to help you organize all the business cards you acquire into an easy-to-use contact database. Simply stick a business card into the scanner, and the CardScan 500's OCR technology extracts such information as names, e-mail addresses, and company, placing them into your contact manager for easy reference.

The CardScan 500 integrates nicely with ACT, GoldMine, Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Lotus Organizer, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Schedule, Sidekick, and other popular programs, while also providing one-touch synchronization with Windows CE and Palm handheld devices. A PC-only device, the CardScan connects to your computer via USB or parallel ports, and can even connect to your digital phone with separately sold Fonesync software and cable.

The CardScan 500 comes backed with a one-year manufacturer's warranty.

Review

Users have long known that Corex Technologies' CardScan Executive is an ace at turning a pile of business cards into a PC database of contact information. Version 5 adds powerful connectivity and information management features.

The CardScan 500 scanner, slightly smaller (and quieter) than the previous version, scans business cards slightly more slowly but more accurately. A new USB port will simplify making connections if you can't use your PC's parallel port or if your printer doesn't work on the scanner's pass-through parallel port. I liked the handy catcher: scanned cards don't fall off my desk. A scanner setup wizard simplifies configuring your CardScan or third-party scanners and helping you get the best scans possible with your equipment.

CardScan 5's OCR software has gone international: besides being able to recognize information on USA and Canadian business cards, it can now handle cards for Australia, Belgium, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. (Note that all of these countries use alphabets identical with, or similar to, English.) Occasionally CardScan sticks a tricky company name (like Widgets USA) into an address field, but you can (and should) manually verify every card.

The improved international support hasn't slowed down the scanning or OCR processing. In an informal test, 25 American business cards took only 130 seconds to scan and 95 seconds to process, with five errors for the 25 cards. To make life difficult, I tried feeding the cards in sideways. The same 25 cards took 195 seconds to scan and 150 seconds to process, with fourteen errors for the 25 cards. I also tried altering one card by circling a phone number on it before scanning. This caused many errors in the information near the area that I circled, but the rest of the card scanned perfectly. Moral: you can deliberately make your accuracy worse if you want, but if you leave CardScan alone it makes less errors than I do typing.

One nice feature is that you can even scan the back of a card now. This is useful if, like me, you jot down notes about people, businesses, or products. CardScan can retain the notes I scrawled on the back.

CardScan now syncs automatically with Psion palmtops, in addition to Windows CE and Palm-based handhelds. I found it easy to make the connection with a Psion, even though you have to use Psion's own somewhat quirky PsiWin software. The prospect of being able to instantly populate a new-out-of-the-box handheld with your complete CardScan contacts database will be popular with many.

I never knew what to do with those vCard email attachments before, but CardScan 5 lets me drag and drop them into my contacts database. The Print Wizard is the simplest and most logical way to select data, page layout, and output format that I have ever seen in any product, period.

CardScan Update lets you peruse Corex's web site for updated software or scanner firmware. Although I doubt I would use this frequently, it is very straightforward, and automatically gets you the most up-to-date versions available.

If you handle business cards, contacts, or handhelds, you need to check out CardScan Executive version 5: for $299, it's an amazing deal. -- From Winmag®