Plustek OptiCard 820 Scanner

The Plustek OptiCard 820 is a portable business card and photo scanner from Plustek.

This scanner is portable in that it will fit in your laptop bag if you're travelling and comes with a little draw string case for it to be carried around in. It is a USB device and comes with a cable.

Installing this scanner is simple yet annoying since it involves you rebooting your computer twice - unless you realise you're going to have to do it twice before hand and click ''Reboot Later'' the first time. Aside from that it installs loads of bits of software that you don't realise you don't need until afterwards. There are actually 4 bits of software it *needs* (aside from the drivers) but it has you install 5. So if you have the luxury of reading this review before installing, don't bother with Mr Photo 3 and its annoying sound effects. Although 4 is too many in my opion for one bit of kit, unfortunately you can't avoid the rest and one of them in particular is actually very good.

Firstly, I'll talk about the Card Scanning function. The scanner has two buttons, ''Scan'' for scanning photos and ''BCR'' for scanning business cards. This is where this scanner gets good! All you have to do is pop the business card face up in the front of the scanner, click the ''BCR'' button and it automatically feeds through and scans the business card. When this is done it immediately opens up Cardiris. This is the necessary but good bit of software. Its basically a digital business card folder. After about 15 seconds of scanning the business card its added to the digital folder. Now this can have amusing results. Firstly, you are given an image of the card which is fine, but it also tries to extract the information from the card and place them into editable fields. To be honest, although mistakes are made, its really quite impressive. I tried this on many different business cards and it picked out the persons name correctly every time. It got the phone numbers and web/email addresses right almost every time, and it got the persons title correct almost all the time. But the company name and addresses often give amusing results. Thankfully though there is an ''extra'' tab where it places any text that it picked up but couldn't place. It has a useful drag and drop feature so you dont have to keep hitting copy and paste. Another nice feature is a magnifying glass. If you click and hold over the image of the business card it will magnify that area of the card for you to see it better and you can move the mouse around whilst holding down the button to see the different parts of the card. A nice touch. At the click of a button you can then synchronise your whole digital business card folder with Microsoft Outlook (along with Frontrange Goldmine, IBM Lotus Notes, Interact Commers ACT, Microsoft Outlook Express, Palm Desktop & Pocket PC - no Mozilla Thunderbird or Pegasus then). This is very quick and works very well.

Ok, moving onto using the OptiCard 820 as a photo scanner. You can see in the screenshots an example of a photograph I scanned with this scanner and the same photograph scanned on a proper big scanner. You can quite easily see that the OptiCard 820 is inferior. The colour definition is much lower and the overall quality leaves much to be desired. But when you look at the size of the scanner (no longer than my hand) you forgive it a little bit! It scans at 300dpi in 24 bit true colour.

The software it has you install to deal with these scanned photos is called Presto! ImageFolio and it is a complete waste of time if you have photoshop or something similar. It looks old and has limited functionality.

Compact & light - very portable.

Great at business card scanning when you consider it has to figure out which bits of text are what and where to put them.

Drag and drop feature makes it really quick and easy to correct mistakes.

Despite having to correct mistakes this method is an immeasurably quicker way to get all your contacts into your email client, and you get a digital card folder too!

Photo scan quality is reasonable.

Photo scan quality is only reasonable.

Too many bits of software which I find intensely annoying.

For the most part the software is rubbish (apart from Cardiris). Most annoyingly, every bit of software puts a new folder in your ''My Documents'' folder along with loads of sample photos. Even if you delete all this it will all return next time you use the software. I couldn't find anywhere in the options to turn this off.

At the end of the day, this scanner is great as a business card scanner, especially if you often go to conferences and are constantly picking up hundreds of business cards. If that sentence describes you, you should seriously consider getting yourself one of these! With this bit of kit you'll have all those new contacts in your email client in no time (as long as you don't use Thunderbird or Pegasus).

But if you're looking for a serious photo scanner then this is not the way to go and the amount of annoying software that comes with this scanner is insane.