Recently I wrote a post asking for recommendations for a good business card scanner. At that time I was exploring a brand called PenPower WorldCard which costs nearly RM500. And then I found that most shops don’t carry the brand but they carried one called Plustek OptiCard which costs around RM300. But since the former came highly recommended, I didn’t think Plustek would measure up.
Not so willing to spend RM500 at the same time, I thought I’d look for an alternative and see what others are recommending. No one provided me with anything and I proceeded then to give Plustek a try. I bought the Plustek OptiCard 820. I’m happy to say that it works just fine and I’m completely happy with it. Read below on what this business card scanner can do and how well it’s been working for me.
I like the sleek look of this scanner!
The Plustek OptiCard 820 model is a colour scanner and can fit up to an A6 paper size. I don’t know exactly know how big an A6 paper is but I’m guessing it’s the size of a standard photograph. You see, apart from scanning business cards, this scanner can also scan photographs.
There are 2 types of scans you can perform, one being an image scan and the other a text scan. For the scanning of business cards, obviously it is better to use the text scan. Once scanned, the colour image of the card is stored along with the extracted information on the card. The extracted data like name, company, telephone number, address, etc are automatically filled into columns for you, much like a spreadsheet on Excel. All these are stored in a software that comes with the scanner.
You can also specify that the same information be stored on an Excel spreadsheet so that you can do data sorting or create a database if you so wish. Very convenient, very easy. You can also opt to have the scanned business card stored directly in your selected email application like Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook. They will be automatically stored into your Contacts folder in the email application. Easy and fast!
On the usage of the scanner itself, it is quite idiot-prove. The device comes with an installation CD that contains some complementary softwares that work with the scanner. All you need to do is to install them all. As for the setting up, it’s not much work, really. Each time you want to perform a scan, just press the buttons on the scanner and determine whether it’s going to be an image or text scan and it will do the rest to store the results automatically for you.
You can do the scan document by document or you can do continuous scans if you have a few at a time to scan through. Just keep feeding the device with the documents before you open them up in batch to view. It’s also quite quick to have a business card scanned through. I scanned some 200+ business cards in about 30 minutes or so.
The Plustek OptiCard doesn’t need to be plugged into a power adaptor to be used. Just connect it to your computer via the USB hub and it will power up. It is also quite small in size and of reasonable weight, so it’s very portable as well. It comes with a pouch to be stored in so that you don’t get dust settling on the device and therefore compromising the scan results.
As you can tell, I’m very happy with the performance of this business card scanner and it has totally met my needs. Retailing at RM299, this business card scanner is really worth it for me. So if you are looking for an affordable scanner like this, you can give this brand and model a try.
