Just a little background: I am a pretty social gal, I go to a LOT of networking events, job fairs, etc.

I have a LOT of business cards. I am a terrible typist.

So…after doing a good deal of research, I decided that an optical business card scanner was just the thing for me. Voila! scan those puppies into a database, pop them into a CRM…done.

Boy, was I wrong.

I run a Mac and there are very few peripherals that are Mac supported, so I was super excited to find one that was at my local neighbourhood Fry’s Electronics.

I ended up with an IriScan Express 2 for about $149.00.

Got home, got it all unboxed giddy with anticipation. First order of business: install the software. Okey Dokey.

Pop the first disk in, it’s the IriScan software. Get that loaded up, plug in the scanner. Easy peasy.

Now the heartache begins.

I go to put the first business card in to scan…nothing happens. I consult the manual…it says to hit the scan button. OK..well, where the hell is the scan button??? Turns out it’s on the device itself. *Facepalm*

So, push the button…still nothing happens. I dig through the software sitting idly on the screen and discover that the business card option is grayed out. WTH??? Did I not just install it???

Turns out there is yet another piece of software that needs to be installed to read business cards. Oooookay…so I do that. All happy now thinking this is going to work. Nope.

By that time, Brian was home for lunch & I had to get him to sit down & try to figure the sumbitch out. It took a friggin’ software engineer to figure out what direction the card goes in the scanner & which button to push to even get an image on the screen.

By this time I was a very unhappy camper.

So, he leaves and I am left alone with it once more. There is supposedly some type of address book that you can scan these images and OCR text into from IriScan. I spent an hour trying to find it within the software. It was nowhere to be found.

By this point, I was pissed. Did I mention I was mad?

Suffice it to say that I am completely disappointed with this product. Sorry Fry’s…it’s coming back.

Major negative points:

Poor overall product design. Who doesn’t have a operational button in the UI???

The UI is total crap. I had to download & install 2 possibly 3 different programs to accomplish 1 action. It is so completely counter-intuitive so as to render it completely useless.

I am convinced that the “manual” was written in Martian, translated into Vietnamese and then into English.

On the plus side, it does do Chinese…maybe they will have better luck.

‘Cause I’m done.