Home > Consumer Reviews > CardScan Executive v8 Card Scanner

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.

The product worked for three days and then stopped working. CardScan is one of these companies that asked not to return the product to the store but to contact their customer service if the product has a problem. I was on hold with customer service for 35 minutes before giving up. I wrote their tech support an email regarding the issue. Two days later I received a response asking me what scanner I had purchased and what color the light was showing (even though all this information was provided in the initial email). After sending this information again they determined that the unit I had purchased was defective and they would send me a new unit. The unit they sent me turned out to be refurbished. I was incredibly disappointed that it took so long for their tech support to respond and that they did not keep to their commitment an exchange the defective unit for a new unit. Considering I had spent close to $300 on a NEW unit and not refurbished one and the unit I purchased only worked for three days this was the least they should have done. This company does not stand by their product.

I have held off getting a card scanner for a long time because I knew that it would be a challenge to find one that could pick up all of the characters and put them in the correct place in Outlook. This one has come a long way. You still need to check each card carefully. Because each company can have such unique titles or logos often only part of the company name is picked up, or a number 1 is seen as a number 7. I do find, that though I type very quickly, this scan process is effective. A bit pricy though for not being able to be "perfect." They do have a 30 day trial which for some people might be the ideal answer.

I just installed the Card Scan Executive for my division and am finding discrepencies between the card and the scan image about 30% of the time. As a result, it is necessary to check each scan for errors, which was an unpleasant surprise. Although it is still faster than typing all of the information in yourself, the system is certainly not flawless.

I've wanted to buy one of these for a long time. I was not worried about the scanning tecnology as much as I was the interface between it and Lotus Notes, my companies address book of choice. It works very well. Not flawlessly, since there is some problem with character recognition when there is extraneous material on a card. Other than that minor irritation, this is a great time saver that keeps my contact information up to date.