CardScan Executive v8 Card Scanner

This is the worst electronic product I've ever bought in my life.After buying the product, I scanned all my 200 business cards and throw them away. It went on to lost all my contacts within a week.I have not been using for about 3 months (since it is not usable) and my cards begin to pile up again. I thought I should reinstall the software and give it another chance. I tried to download the driver from their website, I was taken through the registration process, promising at the end I will get the driver. Instead, I was shown a broken page after I went through the registration and provided all my information.It is an incredible horrible company in terms of products and services. All it has given me is grief.

The small, lightweight unit works perfectly and the OCR is amazing!! I read a lot of reviews before buying this unit and was looking for one that had the best OCR so I didn't have to do a lot of data cleanup. It deciphers cards that have a vertical orientation, dark backgrounds, logos, etc. It can read both sides of a card that has data on both sides.The software installed easily on my Dell laptop running Windows 7 and has worked flawlessly. I have not tried to integrate the results into any other program (e.g., Outlook, my Smartphone, etc.), but the documentation says it can be done.It's fast and the batch processing mode works well if you have been out a networking event and come back with a stack of cards.

I would have thought by now that current OCR software would make reading business cards fairly accurate and reliable. I am the President of a company and expect to be able to quickly enter business cards without having to spend a lot of time reviewing for accuracy. However, I have to make modifications to scanned cards about 50% of the time which arguably defeats having the device. A quick typist could enter just as fast.My recommendation is that if you are quick on the keyboard, this is not a great investment unless you can afford to waste the money. If you are slow at data entry, this probably will save time over the course of a 100 or so cards.More time or money needs to be spent on improving the OCR software. When they can reliably obtain 80% or more accuracy, I would more favorably endorse.

This product is discontinued and does not synch with newer versions of Windows/Outlook, maybe other systems as well. It also appears from Dymo's site that they discontinued the other models of card scanners you might find on Amazon. Dymo discontinued support and mine will no longer transfer card data to Outlook, even with the newest version of the software installed off Dymo's site. When it exports to Excel, it only sends the contact's name and company name - no contact info! Super disappointed as this worked great before 2019. Now I need to throw this expensive thing away and find another contact management solution - and it won't be from Dymo/Cardscan.

I'm not sure why the previous reviewer had so much trouble with the character recognition. Perhaps it is a defect in the particular unit he received. In my case, it did a very fine job recognizing the data on a large variety of business cards. Very fast, and easy to use. I did not activate the integration with Outlook, but did set it up to make the Cardscan contact list available in Outlook, and that worked just fine.My only quibble is with the free online backup that they offer: the fine print tells you that they will email everyone on your contact list periodically to encourage them to join up. This sounds like a great way to lose all your friends, so I didn't do it.

After years of delaying the purchase of a business card scanner, I decided to make the plunge after amassing a pile of 300+ business cards. Generally, I am an early adopter of any technology that introduces additional efficiency into my life. However, I was a bit skittish about obtaining a business card scanner due to the negative impressions of the product category. However, despite a few of its shortcomings, the CardScan Executive has been a worthwhile investment.In the past, coworkers have argued that the accuracy of such products is so low (<90% that they offer little value beyond the manual entry process. While the OCR accuracy of scanning complicated multicolored business cards is in fact only 85% to 90%, the CardScan software facilitates very rapid manual correction of the data. Not only are all of the relevant fields laid out in a consistent tabular form regardless of the original order, but the CardScan software highlights questionable data. At the same time, it allows the user to compare this data to the saved scanned image of the card. This juxtaposition is an important element of the value proposition of CardScan Executive solution. Regardless of the accuracy, the scanned images can be flipped through while inspecting the estimated OCR text. It is important to note that the user can scan hundreds of business cards, rapidly one at a time, before any of the time consuming manual correction takes place.This automated process capability is one element of the software that I didn't fully understand before purchase. Assume you have 500 business cards that have elaborate graphics, which leads you to correctly guess there may be a high error rate. This isn't necessarily a problem as you can 1) scan all of the cards then 2) process (i.e. OCR)then 3) verify manually. The manual step can be done weeks later if you chose. In my case, I often don't know if I will need any of the cards, so the ability to scan and throw away the paper cards is important. Unfortunately it does not have a multi-card sheet feeder so assume that 5-10 seconds per card must be devoted to the original scanning process.Another shortcoming of the CardScan Executive solution is that it does not learn as it goes. For example, if you have several business cards with crazy graphics from employees of a single company, the software does not recognize that you already identified key text on the previously manually verified cards. Moreover, where it can correctly recognize URLs and email domain names, the software can't intelligently determine the company name with this information. The difference between the domain name and the spelling of the company name is most notable with companies that have elaborate icons embedded in their company names.The limitations of the device and software are most likely driven by cost. For several thousand dollars, the afforementioned limitations could be addressed. Yet, at this price point, most individuals who place a value of their time of greater than $20/hour (very low bar for white collar workers) and who want to digitize more than 225 business cards throughout the life of the product will receive a positive return on their investment.Calculation3 minutes saved per card for 225 cards = 11.25 hours11.25 hours @ $20/hour = $225 > $200 purchase priceProsRelatively fast scanningEasy SetupSoftware productivity aids for manual verificationConsNo automated sheet feederDoes not learn from previous verifications or intelligently extract data from the different parts of the card to improve OCR (i.e. company name matched to URL/email domain)