THE CORNERSTONE OF ANY business transaction is the ubiquitous little business card. The task of entering all of the information into your contact manager is an entirely different story. That's where Seiko's Smart Business Card Reader comes in.
It's an upright scanner that plugs directly into the parallel port of your PC, which makes it quite portable to take along on trips.
We put Seiko's scanner to the ultimate test by feeding it in batch mode an unsightly collection of 100 cards collected at a trade show, and another 25 were scanned interactively. In batch mode, the reader deferred all text conversion till the end, making it more efficient to enter a lot of cards at once. Results were surprisingly good.
The scanner had trouble with only a few cards - those that featured low-contrast text or heavily textured backgrounds. Otherwise, we only found a few errors. Even a vertically oriented card didn't trip it up. On the other hand, the software seemed a bit dated since it didn't have a field for Web pages, a fixture on most of today's business cards.
We loved the Smart Zoom feature that enables you to zero in on specific areas. You can drag text directly from the card graphic to any field in the database and export the data into various contact managers.
The consensus is that the Seiko Smart Business Card Reader is a reliable and portable timesaver for anyone who handles a lot of business cards.
-DAVE JOHNSON
Smart Business Card Reader ***1/2
MANUFACTURER: Seiko Instrumcnts USA Inc.,800-688-0817, www.seikosmart.com
PRlCE: $199
REQUlREMENTS: 80386 or higher, 18MB of hard-disk space, 8MB RAM; WIN 3.1 or higher
PROS: Compatible with Goldmine and ACT, good scanning accuracy
CONS: Tired and dated WlN 3.1-like interface