Plustek OptiCard 820 review

Plustek's small and light OptiCard 820 is designed to scan business cards or any other documents up to A6 size (105 x 148mm).

It's about as big as a glasses case, so it's easy to slip into a laptop bag. The scanner feels sturdy enough to survive a few knocks and scrapes, but is supplied with a soft travel pouch that should stop it getting scratched or picking up dust.

The OptiCard gets all the power it needs from its USB connection to your computer, so it doesn't need an AC power adaptor. Plustek supplies it with a 1.5-metre USB cable, along with special cards for calibration and cleaning.

Plustek's software disc includes two simple Presto image-editing applications and IRIS Cardiris software, which is used for importing and filing business cards. The installation was quick and easy, although at one stage a dialogue gave us the impression that we had installed Cardiris. We only discovered that we hadn't when attempting our first business card scan.

Once installed, Plustek's Smart Touch application starts with Windows. When one of the scanner's image-editing or card-scanning function buttons is pressed, it launches the relevant program. The Cardiris application saves images of scanned business cards and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to import the cards' text into editable fields. This information can be synchronised with various applications, including Outlook and Lotus Notes, or exported to file formats that include JPEG images, HTML web pages or comma-separated text. Cardiris proved very accurate with a range of new and dog-eared business cards, but didn't always manage to get information into the right field.

This scanner comes with a TWAIN driver, so you can scan directly into most common imaging applications. Its interface is quite basic, but it offers some filters and gives easy control of settings such as resolution and colour depth. Scanning a 6 x 4in photograph took just 10 seconds at 100 or 300 dpi, and 17 seconds at the maximum 600dpi resolution.

The OptiCard's feed mechanism pulled most documents through smoothly, but it struggled to keep a grip on highly glossy lab photos. This led to blurred and skewed scans, but it recorded other images with faithful colours and reasonable sharpness. It was also able to capture distinct shades in very dark areas of our test photos.