Pokémon card scanner

How to scan a Pokémon card

1. Lay the card flat on a plain surface, in even light. One card at a time in One card mode.
2. Tap “Take or choose a photo” and fill most of the frame with the card. Make sure the name at the top and the number in the bottom corner are sharp.
3. Read the result. The card, its set and number, and its value. If another card looks the same, the scanner shows both and you tap yours.
4. Say which printing it is when the card has more than one, such as 1st Edition, Shadowless and Unlimited. The scanner lists them with what to look for and shows no price until you tap yours, because the printing decides the price.
5. Carry on. See what raw copies sell for by condition and whether it’s worth grading, what copies are listed for right now, a ready eBay title if you’re selling, or add it to the tray and scan the next one.

Scanning a graded slab

Shoot the slab straight on with the whole label in the frame and no glare across it. The scanner spots the slab on its own (or tick “It’s a graded slab” first to save a few seconds), names the card through the case, and reads the label: grader, grade and cert number. You still pick the printing where the card has more than one, because a 1st Edition and an Unlimited PSA 9 are very different money.

• The price is for that grade. A PSA 9 shows what PSA 9s of that printing sell for. Where we don’t have enough sales of that grade, it says “No PSA 9 price yet” instead of showing another grade’s comps.
• Check the cert yourself. The cert number links to the grader’s own lookup. Reading a label doesn’t make a slab genuine: match the card, grade and photos on the grader’s site to the slab in your hand.
• Add it at its grade. Signed in, one tap adds the slab to your collection as, say, PSA 9. If the label was misread, change the grade first.
• A slab counts as one scan. Reading the label costs us a little extra, so it’s only done when there’s a slab in the photo.

After the scan: worth grading, buying and selling

• Raw price by condition. Near mint first, and the played grades where enough copies listed at that condition have sold. Signed in, you can get a rough condition read from your photo (5 a day), which picks the price shown first. It’s an estimate from one photo, and you can change it.
• Worth grading? The raw price next to the PSA 9 and PSA 10 prices for your printing, and the gap to each. Those are what each grade sells for, not the odds of getting it. The grading calculator adds the fees.
• Listed now. For cards worth $15 or more, a few current eBay listings of that exact card and printing, raw and graded, cheapest first, labelled with their asking price beside what that grade sells for. Cheaper cards get a link to the eBay search instead.
• Sell it. A ready eBay title under 80 characters, and the selling calculator with the card and price filled in.

How to scan a binder page

A binder is slow going one card at a time. Switch the scanner to Binder page and photograph the whole page: it names every card in the pockets and lines them up for you to check. It’s built for a standard 3 by 3 page, and it works on any page where the cards sit in rows.

Photographing the page

• Beat the glare first. The pockets are plastic, and so is any sleeve inside them, so glare is what spoils most page photos. Turn the flash off, move away from the lamp or window behind you, and tilt the page until no pocket is shining.
• Keep the page flat. Lay the binder open on a table. A page that bows bends the cards near the rings.
• Shoot straight on, from above the middle of the page, with every card inside the frame. A card cut off by the edge of the photo can’t be read.
• One page to a photo. Get as close as the page allows. The number in the bottom corner of each card should be readable when you zoom in on your photo.

What happens to the photo

1. The page is read in one go. A full page takes around ten seconds.
2. Every card found is outlined and numbered on your photo, then listed in the same order: left to right, top to bottom. Each row puts the card cut from your photo beside our picture of the match, so you can compare them at a glance.
3. Each card is judged on its own, by the same two checks as a single scan. A card it can’t name, a card with a look-alike reprint, and a card that isn’t English each say so in their row.

The review step

Nothing goes into your collection straight from a photo. Every match is shown to you for review first, and we don’t quote an accuracy figure for binder pages, because we haven’t tested enough pages to give one. On each row you can:

• Fix the card. “Wrong card?” opens the other matches from your photo and a search by name and number.
• Choose the printing where the card has more than one, such as 1st Edition, Shadowless and Unlimited, or a reverse holo. No price is shown until you do, because the printing decides the price.
• Choose the condition: raw, or the grading company and grade for a slab. Nothing is filled in for you. If the whole page is raw, “Set all to” does every row at once, and each row can still be changed.
• Set how many copies, or leave the card out.

A row is ready once it has a card, a printing where one is needed, and a condition. The total at the bottom counts ready rows only. “Add to my collection” adds those and tells you which went in, which didn’t save and why, and which were left out.

Limits and sign-in

Binder pages need an account, because the cards you confirm go into your collection. Each card on the page counts as one scan: a full page of 9 uses 9 of the 60 scans a signed-in collector gets in 24 hours, and a page is only read when there is room left for a full one. Up to 6 pages can be read in 24 hours, and one photo shows up to 20 cards.

How it knows which card it is

Two checks, because one alone gets reprints wrong.

• The picture. The photo is matched against every card’s artwork. That finds the card in most cases, and it’s why a card with a worn or missing number can still be found.
• The name and number printed on the card. The scanner reads the text off your photo. The same artwork is often printed in more than one set, with only the number to tell them apart, so when the number it reads disagrees with the picture match, the number wins.

When neither check is sure, it says so and shows the closest cards. It doesn’t guess. A wrong card means a wrong price, and that’s worse than a question.

How accurate it is

We tested it on 60 photos from real sold listings, cards from every era, on Sep 29, 2026. The first card it named was the right one for 55 of 60 (92%), and the right card was among those it showed for 59. It named a card without asking 37 times and was right every time. For the other 22 it showed the closest matches and asked, and it turned one English card away as non-English by mistake.

The photos were sellers’ own, not clean scans: phone shots on desks and carpets, cards in sleeves, cards on stands. The right answer for each was the card the listing was for, which was checked by a separate title-matching system and not by eye, so a few of the “wrong” answers may be the listing’s fault. It’s a test on 60 cards, not thousands, and we’ll repeat it as the scanner changes.

Where it struggles

• Reprints with the same artwork, when glare or blur hides the number. McDonald’s promos are the usual case.
• 1st Edition stamps and Shadowless frames. The test above scores the card named, not its printing. The scanner never decides the printing from the photo: you tap it.
• Sets with many cards of one name, such as the nine Arceus in the Arceus set.
• Dark or angled photos, where it may find nothing at all.

Where the value comes from

Every price is UltraBall’s own, the same figure you’d see on the card’s page. It’s the price of the exact card, not what sellers are asking. The first figure is the ungraded price. PSA grades are shown next to it where enough slabs have sold. A played card is worth less than that figure: the price checker shows what played copies sell for. How we price has the method.

Getting a good scan

• Light from the side, no flash. Flash on a holo wipes out the artwork.
• Fill the frame. A card that’s a small rectangle in a big photo has too few pixels in its number.
• Keep the bottom corner clear. That’s where the number is. Thumbs and card stands tend to cover it.
• One card in One card mode. For a full page, switch to Binder page.
• Hold still. If the name isn’t readable to you in the photo, it isn’t readable to the scanner.

Scanning a pile

Sort a pile keeps the camera open so you can go card after card without touching the upload button. Each card is read as you scan it and joins a running list with its price, and the list keeps a total. Anything at or over your keep line ($20 to start, change it to suit) is flagged “keep”, and anything under $15 is marked bulk. A card with more than one printing sits in the list as “needs printing” and isn’t counted until you tap yours, so the total is never built on a guess.

When you’re done, choose a condition for each card, or use “Set all to” for a pile that’s all raw, and add them to your collection, or download the list as a spreadsheet in the same format as the collection export. Each card is one of the day’s scans, 60 a day, and the scanner shows how many you have left. In One card mode, the tray does the same job a card at a time.

You don’t need to scan everything. Most of a pile’s value is in a few cards. How to tell if a card is rare shows which to pull out first.

What it doesn’t do

• It doesn’t grade. The condition check is a rough read of one photo. For a grade estimate from both sides, use the AI card grader.
• It doesn’t authenticate. It can’t tell a fake card or a fake slab from a photo, and a cert number read off a label isn’t proof either.
• It doesn’t price non-English cards, or other card games.
• It doesn’t read a whole binder at once. One page to a photo.

Once you know what you’ve got

• Worth slabbing? The AI card grader estimates the grade, and the grading calculator shows whether the fee pays.
• Selling? The selling calculator shows what’s left after eBay’s and TCGplayer’s fees.
• Keeping? Put it in the collection tracker.
• Scanner stuck? The set symbols chart and the price checker get you there by hand.