On offer are four color settings, brightness and contrast sliders, a rotation button, and a paper size indicator. Tapping the scan provides editing options. These feel a bit hidden, but this is fine when you know they are there. Its edge detection is suitably responsive and quite accurate, and it’s easy to take several shots to compose a multi-page document.Īfter making a scan, it can immediately be shared and discarded, if you don’t want it to stick around. Readdle’s app lacks Scanbot’s quirkiness, and is a very much more businesslike affair. Magic often works Actions sometimes have duff info Still, when that feature works, it feels just a bit magical. More of a black mark is the lack of editing for actions (telephone numbers URLs email addresses) Scanbot assigns to documents left inside the app, based on their content. That’s a bit opaque, but fine once you know about it. Text can be copied from shared PDFs or in-app by selecting the scan, tapping the ‘⋮’ button at the top-right and then Copy. The app’s OCR capabilities varied between quite impressive (occasionally missing a line or two from a book, or getting URLs wrong) to near perfect. Annoyingly, color and cropping edits cannot later be made after a scan’s saved, which seems like an oversight. On saving a document, it can be sent to all manner of cloud services, local storage, or shared via email. The subsequent editing screen is excellent, providing five alternate color modes, manual cropping adjustment, and two rotation buttons. Pay $4.99/£3.99 and you unlock the ‘pro’ mode that adds OCR, the means to add to existing saved scans, and actions based on information found within your scans.Įdge-detection proved impressive during testing, quickly updating if we moved our iPhone, and only getting things wrong if the hand holding the iPhone was moving. In its free incarnation, you can scan, enhance and upload single or multi-page documents. This is an app that wants to make things easier for everyone - and that’s OK by us. The icon smiles, and both interface and workflow are straightforward. In all cases, lighting was reasonable rather than perfect, in an attempt to duplicate typical conditions when scanning, rather than the ideal.įrom the off, it’s clear Scanbot wants to be the friendly face of document scanning. Each app was tested against a range of documents: a business card a book with serif type documents with bold sans-serif text and a till receipt. After all, a picture of a document is great, but being able to copy and paste the text from it is better. Bonus points were awarded for the means to scan multi-page documents and extract text via OCR (Optical Character Recognition). But which apps can do more?ĭuring testing, then, we were looking for apps that could make the job of scanning easier through edge detection and clean-up. Even Camera can take a photo of a business card, receipt or document and save it for posterity. And that’s the purpose of this group test. It’s then down to software to interpret everything. Today’s scanners are comparatively svelte, although size reductions have been limited by the paper documents they’re designed to scan: most flatbed scanners are at least A4/US letter sized, and feed scanners are a bit wider than a sheet of paper.īut there is - in theory - a better way: use your iPhone! Any reasonably recent iPhone has a perfectly decent camera that’s capable of picking out the fine details from any document you snap. We’re old enough to remember when scanners were huge, lumbering beasts - clunky beige contraptions with massive SCSI leads tethering them to a PC or Mac.
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