I'm a fan of the portable document scanners by Neatworks and Fujitsu. However, as small as they may be, I just don't have the room for them when I travel. I carry around the equivalent of a small electronics store as it it. So when I heard about the DocScanner App for iPhone I was more than just a little interested.
DocScanner turns your iPhone into a mobile document scanner
It's more than just a picture. After all you can already take a picture of a document or receipt and email it to someone. DocScanner takes it up a notch or two by automatically sharpening the image, removing shadows, fixing the white balance (color cast), and fixing the geometry (de-skewing). Once your photo is corrected, it then performs OCR (optical character recognition) on it and allows you to send it out as a PDF or JPG. You can even upload it to your iDisk or other WebDAV server. There is also direct Evernote support.
How does it work?
You can either snap your document shot with the Camera app or directly from within the App. If you snapped it in another app, you can grab it from your camera roll within DocScanner.
Once you bring the photo into DocScanner you then line up the corners with an on screen so that DocScanner can fix the Perspective. You can also adjust the color and contrast. You then hit the scan button and DocScanner quickly converts it.
OCR is an option. Since OCR only works on high-res documents and takes time, you only have to perform this operation on the documents that you really need converted to text.
OCR is cool, but I rarely need it if ever. I'm basically scanning receipts to be electronically submitted as PDFs to my employer's expense reporting system as attachments. No text conversion is necessary.
Once it's done you'll have a high-res PDF or JPG to send to any source that you want.
The Bottom Line
DocScanner is just want I need to scan receipts on the go for Expense Reporting. It's perfect for what I need. My only complaint would be that the PDFs seem quite large (1MB for my simple test). It's not Adobe PDF technology (meaning that it's a PDF clone) and therefore lacks the optimizations you would get with Acrobat. When I opened the PDF in Acrobat Professional 9 and did a simple "Reduce File Size" command, it dropped it down to 220kb. Other than the PDF size issue, Please note that the more light you have the better your results will be. I really like what DocScanner does and therefore it's one of my favorite app.
DocScanner
DocScanner allows you to scan documents on the road with your iPhone's camera. OCR them and convert them to PDF.
- Norfello Oy
- Get on App Store
- $7.99
All info was collected on 10th February, 2010 when the app was reviewed.
About Terry White
Terry is the co-author of The Best Selling "The iPhone Book" 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions. He has been active in the industry for over 25 years and is the founder and president of MacGroup-Detroit, Inc., Michigan's largest Macintosh Users Group, host of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and a technology writer - Terry White Tech Blog.
No trackbacks yet.