Review: Plustek Opticard 820 portable scanner

With most business cards roughly similar in size to many photographs, it must have made sense to Plustek to combine the two ideas into one and produce a scanner that can cope with both.

Indeed, that's exactly what the Opticard 820 does. It's a sheet-feed scanner and comes with software for performing OCR (optical character recognition) on scanned business cards as well as editing photos.

It's easy to install and use, and the supplied software is not too tricky to set up.

The quality of photo scans is good, with decent colour response and sharp image. However, during our tests when photos didn't quite fit right to the edges of the scanner, they had an unfortunate tendency to slip out of place, which resulted in a wonky image.

However, it's possible to pick up a quality A4 flatbed scanner for as little as £35 that will provide as good a photo scan, if not better.

In its favour, the Opticard 820 is a lot smaller than a flatbed. It's also easier to use when scanning a batch of photos - simply inserting each photo through the scanner is far better than having to open and close the lid for each photo on a standard flatbed.

The Opticard 820 is also faster than a flatbed scanner because it doesn't have to do an initial scan of a full A4 page area.

When it comes to scanning business cards, the Opticard 820 excels. The software is easy to set up and use. Scanning a card is simply a case of placing it in the slot and pressing a button on the scanner.

The scanner worked fine on around 80 per cent of the cards we tested it on, although it got a little confused with countries, thinking most of our contacts were from the US by default.

A few, mainly non-standard shaped business cards, gave it major problems, as did those with hard-to-read backgrounds.

Generally, though, the OCR function worked well, and the software keeps the image of the business card as well as the text.

After using the scanner for some time, we found it hard to envisage what kind of person would use both functions equally.

You don't get many business professionals scanning photos alongside their contact's cards, and there aren't a vast number of home users who have a collection of business cards so large they need to store them digitally.

Despite the limited market, the Opticard 820 is an excellent business card scanner and the photo side of things is a bonus.

But if you'll mainly be using it to scan photos there are cheaper, if bulkier, options available.

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