Of all the information we receive on paper, it's hard to think of anything we'd rather get into digital form than the names, addresses, and phone numbers on business cards. But business cards -- with their unpredictable layouts; tiny type; and endless variety of fonts, styles, and colors -- throw traditional optical-character-recognition (OCR) programs for a loop. And converting the text to digital form is only half the battle: The data has to be organized into a consistent, structured database, even though business cards are anything but consistent in the information they include and the layout they use. Two new Mac packages -- the UMAX Technologies BizCard Reader and the La Cie VIP Scan -- address these challenges head-on. Unfortunately, both come up short.
Birds of a Feather
Both products are built around the same compact SCSI scanner model and include the same software. Even their manuals are the same in substance, although they have different layouts, and only UMAX's has an index.
In fact, aside from the labels, the only differences are in distribution, price, and bundled software. La Cie sells the VIP Scan direct for $219, whereas UMAX's BizCard Reader, sold through retail dealers and mail-order outlets, carries a suggested retail price of $245. The best street price we could find was $239, although UMAX expects the street price of its product to drop and match La Cie's direct price by the time this review appears.
The VIP Scan also includes a copy of Now Contact 3.0.1. Upgrading to the current version, 3.5, costs $49.95, but La Cie said it will soon begin bundling the latest release.
The application for both scanners looks like a typical contact-management database. In its default view, it contains 15 standard fields (prelabeled for name, title, address, and other basic information) plus a larger field for notes and another that shows the scanned image of the card. You can rename or hide fields, set default values, switch among several alternative views, or call up a second page with 15 additional fields.
To scan a business card, you place it in a soap-dish-like tray atop the scanner. You have to insert cards one at a time; there's no automatic feeder. The actual scanning takes only about three seconds, but interpreting the results and placing them in the database takes much longer. Using the default settings (400-dpi, grayscale, fast mode), processing a business card took, on average, about 20 seconds on a Power 120; 30 seconds on a Performa 5200; 35 seconds on a Quadra 605; and 52 seconds on a Duo 250. During all this time, your Mac is completely tied up. A Deferred Processing option, however, lets you scan in a stack of cards and leave the time-consuming recognition job until a more convenient moment.
In some respects, the software performed admirably in our tests: It got most phone numbers right and usually placed them in the proper fields. But overall, accuracy was a severe disappointment. In a random sample of 100 cards, fewer than half of the 890 fields -- 412 to be exact -- required no modification at all. In 478 cases, we had to correct mistakes, move data, or key in missing information.
Not surprisingly, the results were better from business cards with relatively large, dark sans serif type, but even with such cards, errors were frequent. Adjusting scanner settings for contrast, speed, resolution (100 to 400 dpi), and grayscale or black-and-white mode sometimes helped, but not always, and we generally found it faster to correct errors manually than to tweak settings and rescan.
A few simple changes in the program might have improved accuracy. Just programming the application so it would put only numbers in the ZIP-code field and enter any phrase containing @ into the e-mail field would eliminate a significant number of errors. Having it check its guesses against a small dictionary of common terms -- so when it thought it saw Hlanger, for example, it would translate it to Manager -- would also help. Although the program filled some fields with outright gobbledygook, many of the recognition errors were minor and could be easily corrected or simply ignored. But even if you concentrate only on the basic information -- name, company, and phone number -- you have to spend a lot of time checking and correcting.
Once you've scanned in your business cards and polished up the results, you can choose whether to keep the scanned image of the card in your database or delete it to save space. You can also choose to export your data to another program (as text or in the native formats of popular Mac personal information managers) or leave it in the scanner's own contact manager. The program doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a full-featured personal information manager, and it can't sort by last name, but it does have a flexible search feature and a variety of label-printing options.
Gotchas Galore
The scanner has a SCSI-ID selector and a single special 50-pin SCSI connector that's more compact than traditional SCSI connectors. Both La Cie and UMAX provide you with a cable that has this kind of connector at one end and a standard 25-pin connector at the other, plus a 50-pin adapter for daisy-chaining your business-card scanner to another peripheral.
Unfortunately, we encountered several SCSI problems with each unit. In the first place, because there's only one connector on the unit, it has to be last in line on your SCSI bus -- an inconvenient restriction if you have multiple external devices. The scanner has a terminator built in, but it doesn't provide power to the terminator; that means you may not be able to use it with a PowerBook unless you also connect another peripheral to supply termination power.
If you use either the VIP Scan or the BizCard Reader with a PowerPC-based computer, you may have to go to the Memory control panel and turn Modern Memory Manager off. Until we did, we experienced regular crashes after scanning one or two cards on a Power 120, Power Computing's 120-MHz PowerPC-based Mac clone.
Before the technical-support staff at Power Computing suggested the memory-manager fix, we called UMAX and La Cie about the problem. The call to La Cie was toll-free, but UMAX doesn't offer toll-free technical support. In both cases, the tech-support lines were busy, so we left messages. A La Cie representative called back the next morning to offer assistance, although he didn't come up with the correct solution. UMAX never called back even after we left a second message.
The Bottom Line
When you consider the enormous variety and artistic self-indulgence of today's business cards, you have to have some sympathy for the developers of these programs. After all, we had trouble reading the fine print with our own eyes on some of the business cards we used for our tests. But accuracy is the name of the game here, and for now these products just don't have enough of it. By the time you corrected all their mistakes, you'd have been able to key in the information you need manually -- and save yourself $200 and a lot of frustration.
Identical twins, the La Cie VIP Scan and UMAX BizCard Reader can read your business cards and enter the information into a contact manager. But both scanners are hit-or-miss when it comes to accuracy.
The software that ships with both the La Cie VIP Scan and the UMAX BizCard Reader looks like a contact manager. It has fields for name, title, address, notes, and the like, plus a field that displays the image of the card you're scanning.
La Cie VIP Scan
Rating: Poor (2 of 5 mice)
Price: $219 (direct).
Pros: Bundled with Now Contact. Has export filters for placing data in personal information managers. Deferred-recognition option. Toll-free tech support.
Cons: Inaccurate recognition requires constant correction. Only one SCSI connector. Doesn't provide power to its built-in terminator. No background processing.
Company: La Cie, Beaverton, OR; 800-288-9919 or 503-520-9000.
Reader Service: Circle #406.
UMAX BizCard Reader
Rating: Seriously Flawed (1 of 5 mice)
Price: $245 (list).
Pros: Has export filters for placing data in personal information managers. Deferred-recognition option.
Cons: Inaccurate recognition requires constant correction. Only one SCSI connector. Doesn't provide power to its built-in terminator. No background processing. Poor customer service.
