IrisCard Pro

The hardware side of the IrisCard Pro package is a reasonably portable, 600 ppi color scanner that measures 1.1 by 5.9 by 2.6 inches (HWD) and weighs just 7 ounces. Thats big enough to scan anything up to 4.2 inches wide, but small enough to stay out of the way on your desk and portable enough to carry on the road. The portability is particularly useful if you want to scan cards at the end of each day when youre traveling.

That way, you can add notes while you still remember why you took each card. Like most business card scanners, IrisCard Pro has no power cord, getting its power over its USB cable instead. Setting it up the first time is as easy as installing the software and connecting to a USB port. Once the software is installed, setting it up to use when youre traveling is just a matter of plugging in the cable and launching the software.

The heart of any business card scanning package is the software. It is largely responsible for how you go about scanning, as well as how well the package does its main job.

That is parsing business card text into the right fields name, address, phone number, and so on and then recognizing the text. The better it does this, the more time it will save you.

The software, CardIris version 3.5, scores well on making the scanning process reasonably painless. You can scan and recognize each card, then check the accuracy before moving on to the next, if you like.

This is fine for scanning one or two cards at a time. You also have the option of setting the scanner to automatic mode. This will start scanning when you put a card in the input slot without your having to give a scan command for each card. I found that far easier for scanning a stack of cards, since it let me feed card after card just as quickly as if the scanner had an automatic document feeder.

Once youve scanned the full stack, you can then recognize all the cards with a single command. After the software recognizes the text, you can check the results, with the program conveniently showing the original image as well as the recognized text. As with most business card programs, CardIris marks the newly recognized cards as unverified. You can go through the cards at your leisure, only a few at a time if you like, and change each to verified as you go.

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