I have tried four different programs and finally settled on stampcat at the
overall best for my needs.

What I was looking for.

!. Ease of use in adding stamps to the collection. This one beat all the
others as you only have one screen to deal with and all the information you
really need is there. You can also modify most of the boxes you input data
in to reflect your preferences. On the other three programs you had to go
to more than one screen (ie click on a tab) to input all your data, or see
it. This is fine is you are working in a museum and want a detailed
catalog of each stamp you are collecting, but for 99% of us, what you see on
the stampcat page is more than you ever want to know. Even something as
simple as the perf size was easy to add with this program. Try putting in
12.5 x 10.5 in another program.

Scanned pictures of your stamps: On a different program you had to input
the scan's of your photo in one of three different ways, depending on how
the individual stamp was loaded into the program. You also had to be
careful on how you labeled the scanned picture file. On another you could
have four different scans (nice), but you could not lock in the size of the
scan, (a real pain). On stampcat, just scan the stamp, I label it with
it's Scott number and then save it. Once loaded in the program, you can
delete the scan, but I don't. I save it to a separate directory to have a
back of of all the scans of my stamps. Why go through the trouble of ever
re-sanning a stamp again, should you ever have a problem with your comptuer
or a program.

2. Reports. What good is a computer catalogue if you can't easily print
out different reports to document your work. This one beat all the others
by a mile by how easy it is to use and the quality of the report layouts.
This one item was my biggest frustration with all of the other programs.
For insurance reasons, you can't beat the printout you can get of your
collection.

3. There is one negative about stampcat. While you can get databases of
different countires, I find them to not be worth the trouble to load in, and
I just manually load in each stamp I own as I get to it.

4. Cat value of your stamps. No program is perfect here. I prefer to
use the Scott cataloge as my source as to the current value of a stamp. I
have yet to find a program that will let me put in the scott values, AND
also let me put in what I figure is the value of my stamp based on a percent
of the scott value. Remember that the Scott value is for a very fine stamp
with no faults, and not all of your stamps will be very fine or be fault
free. Some of the other programs use their own mystery source as to the
current value of stamps (which I think is even worse) and if you ever load
in an updated database it will reset all of your currently loaded values (a
major bummer). This alone defeats the purpose of using their catalgue
databases.

5. Cost. The cheapest of all the ones I tried. It was also the easiest to
use. Sometimes simpler is much better. go to stampcat.com and check it
out.

6. If you are going to scan your stamps to include in your cataloge,
(highly recommended), then the I strongly recommend EzImage. I use the pro
version and it is worth every cent you pay for it on the ease of scanning
stamps. Two big pluses of this program. You pace a stamp on your scanner
and do the scan, but you will 'never' get it to be aligned straight. This
program will align the scanned stamp with just one click of the mouse. If
you don't want to scan each individual stamp you can place several on your
scanner and do one scan, and then let the program sort them into individual
scans. Resize the stamp to fit into your program or change the size of
it's file size, is another huge item and you can also do this with one click
of the mouse. The script feature is POWERFUL. You can find this at
ezstamp.com. EzGrader is another nice program to check the margins of the
stamp (the perf part of the program sucks), and if you create your own
album pages, the AlbumGen program is a must have.