Do you ever wish that you had a flatbed scanner in your bag? Well, with scanning apps for iOS you almost have. I will be honest straight up and say that if you have an iPad 2, the camera is flatly not good enough to get the quality of images needed for these apps. Read on though because, should you ever find yourself with a device with a better camera, it is worth knowing about what they do.
If you want to capture a document or newspaper article you can take a conventional photo and this may be fine. If you use a scanning app, it still takes pictures using the device's camera but it does more than capture a snap:
- It removes the background by detecting the edges of the page, so you get the document minus your kitchen table in the background
- It straightens documents to remove the keystone effect (which you will have experienced if you have tried to get a projector to make a rectangular image rather than an trapezoidal one)
- It works some algorithmical magic to sharpen images and make text even clearer
- You can save the resulting image in different file formats (usually jpg or pdf) depending on what you need them for
- You can combine multiple scans into a single pdf
- Some apps have OCR (optical character recognition) so rather than just seeing your scan as a picture in can either convert it into editable text or make it searchable.
When might you find this useful? Well, students can use it to quickly grab decent copies of handwritten work for themselves (as a backup, record for for filing), teachers can use it to sample great work by students for showing to the class or sharing on the screen and on the school intranet. You can use it to capture newspaper articles for distribution and discussion. Infact, because you always have your scanner with you, you will actually find more uses for it than you would for a normal flatbed scanner.
Ones to try:
Tiny Scan - FREE, in app purchase to Pro version £2.99
Genius Scan - FREE with ads, in app purchase to + version £4.99 (for no ads, printing signatures and cloud export)
Turbo Scanner + OCR Free - FREE, in app purchase to Pro version £1.99
Scanbot - FREE, in app purchase to Pro version £1.99
Scanner Pro - the one I use and have always been happy with £1.99
Whilst the above apps are all dedicated scanner apps, it is also worth remembering Evernote (free and see here for more details), which when you open the app, lets you take photos which it then tidies and OCRs for searching later.
Tips when using these apps are to have good light, although some of them use a phone's built-in flash, keep the item being scanned as flat or smooth as possible, and, for good edge detection, don't try and capture the document on a background that is the same colour (e.g. a white page sitting on a white table doesn't work as well as on a grey table!).
What are your experiences so far? Please let me know with a comment. :-)