The cameras and the apps in our smartphones are getting better and better, and I use mine more and more as a document scanner. They won’t replace my ScanSnap anytime soon, but for one-off scans and capturing receipts, they are great.
Recently I did a post comparing Android document scanning apps, but since then, The Grizzly Labs have released Genius Scan for Android.
Long-time readers of DocumentSnap will probably recognize Genius Scan. It was the first scanning app that captured my heart for the iPhone, so I was pretty happy to see that an Android version is available, and decided to take a look.
Mind disclaimer: when this app was in beta testing, Grizzly provided me with a beta copy. However, when it was officially released, I went out and bought it myself.
Types of Documents
I tried to keep the test the same as the Android review, so you can compare. As before, I will be scanning three types of documents that I normally scan using a smartphone:
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Magazines: I am scanning from Mazda’s Zoom-Zoom magazine because it is nice and glossy. I’ll scan two pages from this in each app.
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Single Sheet Documents: Sometimes it can be easier to bust out the smartphone for certain types of one-off scans. I will scan a single black & white page.
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Notebook Pages: If I have text in a notebook and I don’t want to rip it out, I will use a smartphone to scan it. This is the very first sketch of what would become DocumentSnap.
The Test
These tests are done on a Samsung Galaxy Player.
As with all my mobile scanning tests, I am trying to simulate the real world by doing this test in the Starbucks near my house.
The Criteria
Here is what I looked at for each app:
- Quality
- Adjustment tools
- Export Options
- Scan Size
Let’s see how the apps compare.
Quality
Quality is, of course, subjective, so you can evaluate for yourself. Here are all the scans in PDF format:
You will notice that the Notebook file needs to be rotated. The weird thing is, I had rotated it in the app, but the export comes out un-rotated. Not sure if I have hit a bug here or what.
A quick note about quality. The Galaxy Player doesn’t have the greatest camera, so you can assume that scan quality in general with an Android phone with a better camera.
Adjustment Tools
Genius Scan keeps the fiddling to a minimum, and has two enhancements that you can apply post-scan: Color and Black & White. You can, of course, have no enhancement at all.
Export Options
As with most (all?) Android apps, the export and sharing options are very good. You can choose to export a page or an entire document, and you can export it in PDF or JPG format.
As you can see, I can export to Evernote, Dropbox, and Gmail, along with any other apps that I have installed on my Android device that accept these types of files.
File Size
Here are the file sizes for each document:
- Magazine: 1.7 MB
- B&W: 395K
- Notebook: 628K
So, the color scans are larger than other Android apps if you are worried about these sorts of things.
Wrap Up
Genius Scan for Android has a nice, easy to use interface and the quality is quite good[1].
It is .99 in the Google Play store which is a bit less expensive than other comparable scanning apps. It doesn’t have all the adjustment bells and whistles of some of the other apps, but there is something to be said for simplicity too.
Have you tried Genius Scan on Android? How do you like it?
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Especially considering my Samsung’s camera. ↩