Customer Reviews

Penpower WorldCardColor Color Business Card Scanner

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

After reading the other reviews I was concern about the scanner, however, my time and buget was limited and I had a lot of cards to input. So, I decided to give the scanner a try.

I was pleasantly confirmed that I made the right choice. It does have problems recognizing hand written cards and fancy font - which is good for me to know about my own business cards, however, it's real easy to fix when adding notes about my new business associates.

Overall, I really like my scanner, I found the whole system easy to install, the program user friendly, and the set up quick to start scanning - about 5 - 10 minutes. I was able to scan 50 cards, add notes and edit recognition issues within minutes - about 15.

Hope this helps!

I was looking for a duplex card scanner to scan ID/insurance cards at a medical practice. Amazon did not have information on this scanner to say for sure, but some other sites online did note that this is scanner can do double-sided scanning. This is *not* a duplex scanner. The included software allows the user to scan a double-sided card as a single record, but the user must manual scan both sides of the card separately. There are other scanners out there that can scan both sides in a single pass...Ambir and ScanShell both make these types of scanners.

I have scanned over 500 cards using this new scanner. It has worked great and recognized over 90% of the content correctly. Only has problems with fancy fonts or cards that are hard to read in the first place. I highly recommend this card scanner!

We purchased the card scanner because we acquire a lot of business cards/prospective customers from trade shows. This machine is a life saver - it will scan the card in very quickly and displays the scanned image right away. The contact details (company name, name, address, phone, fax, etc.) are also listed. The only problem we saw was that the card scan was not 100% accurate - it would scan the text correctly, but would populate some of the fields incorrectly. I would probably double-check things out a little bit, especially if the business card is very non-traditional.

We currently use Salesfoce to keep track of these people and you can import this directly. Another great selling point is the fact that it is Windows 7 compatible. At work, we have Windows 7 and XP computers, so it's nice to be able to use this software/machine on any computer.

All in all, it's a great product.

I bought this scanner about four years ago - maybe five. It has done pretty much everything I wanted, and captured around 1500 business cards in that time. It exports its data to Outlook without fuss, and I also like to keep the Worldcard database on my portable, as I can then look up the original business card scan picture to see anything that may no be captured in the OCR - which works well on normal cards.

Sadly my use is now going to be restricted, as I have switched to a Mac and my model is not Mac compatible. So it will be restricted to use on my desktop when I am back at base.

However this time when I got back and got it out from the cupboard the whole of the casing was sticky. I've had this with cheap plastic goods in the past, but I did not expect it to happen to a branded item, so I wrote to the manufacturer in Taiwan. I asked whether the life of the item was only four to five years, and if not what should I do to deal with the stickiness. I got a reply, but not from Taiwan; they had passed my email on to their distributor in Singapore. They said:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,
Actually isn't so. It might be due to the room temperature too warm.

Thank...
SAM>>
God Bless...

Penpower Technology (S) Pte. Ltd.
Our Office Address...
1 Tannery Road
#07-03 One Tannery
Singapore 347719
Tel: 63420566
Operating hours: 9am to 6pm (Monday to Friday)
Lunch time: 1pm to 2pm

-------------------------------------------------------------

So there you have it. It's official. It doesn't have a life of only 4 to 5 years unless room temperature too warm. I live in the tropics so yes room temperature is warm.

Not being of a religious nature I did not find the reply very helpful. But I did more research: the problem is caused by the plasticiser in the plastics bleeding to the surface, so it is basically a quality issue (or a design decision on the life of the product; has to be one or the other). According to the Barbie doll refurbishment site (apparently Barbie has this embarrassment as she gets old) a wash in warm water followed by talc helps. Since I don't fancy the washing of electronic equipment I just talced the surface, though I tried to be careful not to get it inside the scanner - that fine dust is hardly helpful to the moving parts. It's much less sticky now.

This is a pretty handy little gadget to have around... especially when you have hundreds of cards to input into your computer. I just plowed my way through 293 business cards!

It has a hard time reading fancier fonts, and some card layouts trick it as well - so you will probably have to do some sort of editing. But it's a heck of a lot easier than typing it all in from scratch! And importing the data was a breeze.

It was also super easy to install (and I'm very low-tech.)

When looking for a card scanner that would work with my Macintosh computer, the ad for this scanner state that it would work with both PC and MAC computers, which caused me to purchase this item. When received, it became apparent that it did not work with MAC Computers. Very disappointing, indeed. I was able to sell this one to a friend who needed one for her PC, which relieved me of having to try returning the item.
Please make sure that all copy is correct.

This product is very nice and easy to use. I installed it easily on a PC running Windows 7 64-bit OS and encountered no problems. It scans quickly and in most cases, accurately. The OCR is good, but it does do some funky things once in a while with cards that may be formatted unusually, it's fairly easy to correct errors, though, and the info appeared automatically in Outlook with no prompting from me.
Overall, it's a very nice item with easy to use, intuitive software. Plus, it's way cheaper than other card scanners.
As for scanning photos, which it claims to do, I don't know, I didn't buy it for that purpose.

The Penpower WorldCardColor Color Business Card Scanner is exactly as advertised and a great price. Less expensive than most other card scanners. Software is a little cumbersome but very workable. I like the fact you can directly scan into ACT! If you are a serious networker, use a contact manager and don't have a card scanner you're either losing potentially valuable contacts or don't collect business cards.

Within 2 hours, I installed, scanned and corrected 150 cards - I'm impressed.

What it does well:
Good text recognition
Clear scans of cards which are saved to the record
Software is easy to use and learn quickly

Not so well:
Doesn't recognize italics or script as text
Has problems with cards with a lot of texture
Need to make sure cards are absolutely flat with no creases, bends, etc
Software font is very small


I've had to go through about 80% of the records to check something, but it has still saved me a TON of time over typing these individually. For the price I didn't expect perfection, but am very very happy.