ScanROver the years I’ve collected a huge stack of business cards. This is primarily the case because I just don’t have the energy to either type them all in by hand or scan them into one of those card readers - which incidentally cost a couple hundred bucks.

So, imagine my delight when I discovered a free service which allows you to take a digital photo of a business card, e-mail or upload it and then have the contacts information automatically e-mailed back in Vcard format ready to import straight into Outlook!

All right, in all fairness I’ve blogged about this site before, but that was when the site was still in Beta and didn’t have the business card scanning functionality built in.

The service, provided by ScanR, also performs similar functions for whiteboards or documents by allowing you to snap a photo, upload it, and have it sent back in a PDF format. It sure beats copying everything down by hand!

There are a couple of technical requirements:

  • For whiteboard photos you need to have at least a 1 MP camera in your cell phone.
  • For documents or business cards you need to have at least a 2 MP camera (more specifically images have to be at least 1,600 x 1,200 resolution).
  • If your phone camera isn’t high enough resolution you can also take photos with your normal digital camera and just e-mail them in.

Luckily, even though my phone (Sprint PPC-6700) camera is only 1.3 MP, it includes a 1,600 x 1,280 resolution mode meaning it works for everything ScanR has to offer!

Now, I found that the service reads normal fonts on business cards very well, but if they used a fanciful handwritten type of font it’s going to hose that all up…

In my aforementioned previous post I also gave a few warnings about security implications, so if you’re interested you may wish to review it again.

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