Business-card scanners are about as much of a niche product as you can find. But if you want to keep track of the contacts and potential customers who give you business cards, a scanner just to deal with these cards is an obvious choice. If you can't find room in your budget for a desktop document scanner that includes business-card scanning, or if you need a very small scanner to travel with, a biz-card scanner is pretty much your only choice. The IRIS IrisCard Pro 4 ($199 direct), which is greatly improved from IRIS's previous version, is worth considering.

The IrisCard Pro 4 hardware is similar in some ways to the IrisCard Pro version 3.5 scanner it replaces, at least to the extent of its resolution and size. The 600-pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution is more than enough for recognizing text on business cards. At 3 by 6.1 by 1.9 inches (HWD) and 5.6 ounces, it's very portable as well as small enough to fit on a desktop without taking up much space.

Setting up the IrisCard is pretty much standard fare. Like most biz-card scanners, it gets power over the supplied USB cable, so all you need do is install the software and connect to a USB port. Once set up, the first time you load the software, it prompts you to calibrate the scanner, using a supplied calibration sheet. (According to IRIS, if you lose the sheet and need to calibrate again, you can use a white #10 envelope in its stead.)

The manual's setup instructions say you need to choose a configure button, and then choose the scanner model. In reality, the button is grayed out and unavailable. But if you're brave enough to ignore the manual, everything works without problems.

As with any scanner, software is much more important than hardware in determining the package's personality, and at least as big a factor in determining how well the package works. The software (Cardiris Pro 4) stands out for its ease of use and its accuracy, both in recognizing text and in recognizing which text goes in which field—name, street address, city, state, phone number, and so forth.

One particularly nice touch is the automatic mode. When this is turned on, the scanner will start scanning when you put a card in the input slot—there's no need to give a scan command for each card. I found this particularly convenient for scanning a stack of cards. It let me feed cards one after the other as quickly as if the scanner had an automatic document feeder (ADF)—although, of course, I actually had to feed them one at a time.

Once you scan the full stack of cards, you can give a single command to recognize all the cards at once. You can then go through the results on-screen, one by one, comparing an image of each card with the recognized text. Like most business card programs, Cardiris marks newly recognized cards as unverified. You can then view just the unverified cards at your convenience, and mark each card as verified as you go.

Cardiris 4 was noticeably more accurate on my tests than the version it replaces. With version 3.5, I saw at least one mistake in the person's name, company name, or phone number on the vast majority of cards. Version 4 managed to read about half the cards without a mistake. That's a significant improvement, though still not as good as the more expensive CardScan Executive, which recognized about two thirds of our test cards without a mistake.

Once you've scanned, recognized, and verified some cards, Cardiris can serve as a contact manager and also send the data to an assortment of other contact managers, including Outlook, Outlook Express, Sage's ACT! (version 9 and above), GoldMine, Palm Desktop, and IBM Lotus Notes. On my tests, the synchronization feature worked with Outlook 2003 without problems.

Like earlier versions, Cardiris Pro 4 includes a Twain driver, which lets the scanner work with almost any Windows software that has a scan command. The driver even includes options for scanning 3.5-by-5 and 4-by-6 photos. (You can actually scan originals up to 4.5 by 12 inches.) I'd generally recommend against using the scanner with photos you care about, however, because sheet-feed mechanisms tend to degrade the originals.

On my tests, photos tended to slip when going through the scanner. As a result, I had to feed some of them through more than once to get an acceptable scan. The scan quality, however, was more than good enough for business purposes, and being able to scan photos is a useful extra if you're willing to risk your originals.

One odd issue—more of a rough edge than an actual problem—is that the setup program installs a WIA scan option that shows up, for example, on the import menu in Photoshop. If you choose the option, though, you'll get an error message. According to IRIS, this is expected behavior, based on WIA's limitations. Nonetheless, I've never seen a similar issue in any other scanner I've tested. This isn't a fatal flaw, especially since I'd have recommended using the Twain driver as the preferred choice in any case. But it's an unnecessary bump in the road for anyone who tries the WIA option.

Both WIA support and photo scanning are extras for a business card scanner and wouldn't be missed if not included at all, so I'm disinclined to count the problems in these features against the package. More important is that IrisCard can do a reasonably accurate job recognizing the text on business cards, and it can spare you lots of time spent typing the information into a contact management program. IrisCard Pro 4's overall balance of program design, accuracy, and price makes it well worth considering.

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