The OCR software is stunningly accurate on some portions of the scanned information. Of the 80 cards I scanned and converted, only 2 needed any corrections to the address information or the primary phone numbers. A great deal of attention was obviously spent in this portion of the conversion software. Much to my surprise, some very difficult addresses came in without a hitch. The printed documentation warns users that "CardScan has been optimized for North American business cards. Though it will do an acceptable job with international cards, the results will not be as good as with U.S. and Canadian cards." This was borne out in my testing with Foreign addresses having slightly more problems with postal codes, and city, state and province abbreviations.

By and large, the software seemed excellent at working with a wide range of typefaces and sizes. Some cards which had text too small to comfortably read scanned completely accurately. Italic and bold text also seemed not to confuse the scan engine.

The start to finish speed of the scan is very good for an entry level consumer device. In my tests, most cards scanned in approximately 6 seconds and the OCR conversion took an additional 4 or 5 seconds. Being batch oriented, the scanning system would allow most users to easily scan hundreds of cards in an hour.

Normal types of errors (upside-down cards, off-angle printing) are all handled automatically by the scanner software with aplomb. Images are flipped right side up or de-skewed by the scanner without human intervention.

Headings in front of phone numbers are usually applied to the phone number. So, if you've got a card with the following types of phone numbers: "Main, Direct, Fax, Mobile or US Tel", the scanner software would place the correct labels in front of the converted information.

Is the scanning system perfect?
In a word, no - but it is very, very good. The CardScan Plus 300 never missed the mark completely but it was also very rare for the system to get everything completely correct. Out of the 80 cards which I scanned, only 3 of them required no modifications to the converted data. On average each card needed 1 or 2 simple edits. Most of the errors which I saw were in the company name or contact name fields. Since company names are one of the things that tend to be most graphical and have the greatest variety of fonts and presentations, this shouldn't be surprising.

There were also problems sometimes with phone numbers going into the wrong fields: those reserved for email addresses and URLs. The system seemed to occasionally confuse the URL for a company with the contact's email address. Given that URLs almost always begin with the ubiquitous www and that the software allows you to launch your browser to the contact's URL, I would hope that Corex could improve the functioning in this area of the translation. Only if the URL on a business card was preceded with "http://"; did it scan in correctly and was placed in an additional field below the contact's email address.