IRIS IRISCard Pro 4 review

IRIS's IRISCard Pro 4 is a compact USB business card scanner that can scan a card in about five seconds.

You can choose from several resolutions up to 600dpi and select from a number of paper sizes and orientations, including business cards in both landscape and portrait orientations and, strangely, 6x4in photos.

Once you've entered scan mode and calibrated the device, it can quickly and automatically scan cards as you feed them in. However, the scanner didn't always respond to the presence of a card and we often had to recalibrate the device when we restarted the software.

Each business card is saved as an image and displayed in the IRISCard's electronic Rolodex. You can then select your scanned cards and use the software's optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities to attempt to read the information on them. It did a passable job of this, correctly recognising data from even vertically oriented cards and assigning it to appropriate fields in its database.

Most of the data required some correction, particularly in the case of cards that used small fonts. UK postcodes were often incorrect, with zeros interpreted as the letter 'o'. It didn't always add all the phone numbers on a card to the database, and it was unable to file mobile phone numbers marked with only the letter M, which is commonplace in the UK. Like most card reader software, it was unable to interpret company names that appeared as images, and it had trouble with stylised or unusually coloured text. The OCR didn't work at all on very pale text or on text on a dark background.

Once you've scanned the front of a card, you can choose to add the back of the card to its entry. This is particularly useful if you have a lot of two-sided cards or if you make notes on the back of business cards. The OCR software completely ignored our hand-written notes on either side of the cards, but they didn't interfere with its ability to interpret information printed on them correctly. It also successfully read creased and stained cards.

Once data from the cards has been recorded, the software can synchronise and export data in a variety of common formats, including as a comma separated value (CSV) text file and in Outlook, Excel and even iPod formats, among many others.

The IRISCard Pro 4 provides an effective way to get information from a large number of business cards on to your PC quickly. However, the software interface is clumsy and uncooperative, and the OCR was unreliable, requiring us to correct at least one field on every card we scanned. We prefer Dymo's Cardscan Personal, which costs just a little more but was equally fast and produced more accurate results.