Paper, paper, paper, it’s everywhere. Wouldn’t you give anything to lessen the piles of paper you have to deal with? Documents, receipts, business cards. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just scan it and forget it? How can you do that while you’re away from your desk? Meet DocScanner, a way to turn your iPhone or iPad into a portable, and powerful scanner.
Overview
By using DocScanner, you can use the built-in camera on your iPhone or iPad to scan documents, save them to your device, and then save them to the cloud, (iCloud, Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Drive are all supported). You can also save the document as a PDF, including OCR, and email them to yourself or others.
Multi-page documents, receipts, business cards, whiteboards, almost anything you need to capture an image of and access later can be digitized using DocScanner.
I tried DocScanner out on various documents, business cards, and receipts. The app did a very good job capturing excellent images of everything I digitized. I tried the app on both my iPhone 5, and my third-generation iPad. The scanning process was quick and easy, and allowed either presetting for the type of scanning subject, or you could allow the app to automatically decide the document type.
When it came to OCR, I got better results with documents than I did business cards or receipts, which is to be expected. Documents seemed to OCR at a 90% rate or so, with occasionally spelling errors, and sometimes it completely got a word wrong, but that’s approximately the same average I had experienced with other scanning apps on the iPhone and iPad.
Business cards and receipts fared worse, with business cards with standard black on white horizontal layouts faring much better than cards in a vertical layout, or those with multiple colors of both ink and paper stock. Receipts OCR’ed fairly well, although some cleanup would be needed to enter the information into another program.
PDF creation worked well, and created clean versions of the documents. Scanned documents could also be saved as JPEG files, and could be emailed, saved to the camera roll on the device, printed to an AirPrint compatible printer, (this worked very well), and saved to iCloud, or one of the other previously mentioned services.
Apparently HP network attached flatbed scanners can be used as an external document source, with the driver for HP scanners available as a $3.99 In-App Purchase, however I was unable to test this feature.
Once scanned, documents can be viewed on the device, and the user has the ability to zoom and rotate the documents by using two finger gestures.
Verdict
I found DocScanner easy to use, and the scanning process was simple, with little trial and error involved. Most documents scanned cleanly and sharply, with the app automatically edge detecting all of the documents, to obtain a clean scan. OCR could be a little more accurate for my taste, but as I said, I’ve found other apps of this type to have similar accuracy rates. The ability to save your scanned document to cloud based storage is a nice touch, as is the ability to save in different formats for emailing or saving to the local device.
I would recommend DocScanner to any iPhone or iPad user in need of a portable scanning solution. The price at $4.99 is certainly right for an app of this caliber, and the app definitely presents a value for the cost.
Rating:4/5[rating:4.0]
Price: $4.99 – A Universal app, DocScanner works great on either the iPhone or iPad, available in the App Store. [DIRECT LINK]
Pros:
- Uses the full screen of the iPhone 5
- Scanning functions work quickly and smoothly.
- The automatic setting almost always selected the proper kind of document to be scanned.
- Cloud storage, always a nice touch.
Cons:
- OCR could use some work.
- Has problems with business cards that aren’t in the standard black and white horizontal layout.
