One area of computing that has really exploded in the last year or two is document scanning on mobile devices. Both cameras and apps are getting better and better, and the quality and price (sometimes even free) is pretty remarkable.
I’ve had a number of document scanning apps on my iPhone 4 for quite some time, but have never put them head-to-head until now.
Use Cases
Everyone has different use cases for these types of apps, but here are mine:
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Scanning Magazines: When there is a one or two page magazine article that I want to capture, or just part of a page, I just use my iPhone to grab it and send it to Evernote. If it is longer than that or I want really good quality, I will typically cut it out and scan it with my ScanSnap S1300.
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Single Or Attached Documents: If I get something I want to quickly capture, or if it is something that wouldn’t easily go through a scanner, I will use my iPhone. Good examples of this are my son’s swimming and skating lesson report cards. When he (eventually) passed Sea Turtles, I didn’t care about the rest of the booklet, just that one page.
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Notebook Pages: Sometimes I like to write or sketch in a notebook, and I want to capture this information but don’t necessarily want to rip pages out to scan them. Document scanning apps are great for this.
The Contenders
I have four document scanning apps on my iPhone, so these are the contenders:
- Genius Scan (I wrote about Genius Scan previously on DocumentSnap)
- JotNot
- DocScanner
- Scanner Pro
The Test
I used the four iPhone document scanning apps mentioned above to scan the following documents. To put it in a “real world” environment, I did the testing and am writing this from my local Starbucks. The elderly couple arguing beside me may or may not influence the results.
- Two pages from Mazda Canada’s “Zoom Zoom” magazine – glossy pages with rich colors.
- One black and white page from a school handout
- A old sketch from my notebook: the first time I sketched out what would eventually be DocumentSnap.com
The Criteria
Here is what I looked at for each app:
- Quality
- Adjustment Tools
- Export Options
- File Size
- OCR
Ready? Let’s go.
Quality
Since Quality is somewhat subjective, I will let you judge for yourself. Here are links to the PDFs from the four contenders:
- Genius Scan: Magazine | B&W Doc | Notebook Sketch
- JotNot: Magazine | B&W Doc | Notebook Sketch
- DocScanner: Magazine | B&W Doc | Notebook Sketch
- Scanner Pro: Magazine | B&W Doc | Notebook Sketch
Here are my thoughts:
For the magazine, Scanner Pro and JotNot seem to look the best, and Genius Scan is good too.
For the black & white document, JotNot and DocScanner look the best. In all cases I used Black & White mode (more on that in a moment).
For the notebook sketch, Scanner Pro and DocScanner look the best to me. This was one document where adjustment options really helped.
Adjustment Tools
JotNot has a huge selection of adjustment options that you can see in the screenshots below:
DocScanner also has some simple adjustment options. You can adjust the size, “whiteness”, and sharpen.
Scanner Pro has simpler adjustment options as well. You need to be careful with these and make sure that you set them for every page or you will get some surprising results.
Genius Scan has the simplest adjustment options of all: None, Color, and Black & White.
Export Options
In most cases, a document scanning app is pretty useless if you can’t get the document off of your mobile device.
The usual method, which all document scanning apps support, is to email the document as PDF somewhere. Different apps support different options, so here are the export options for each app:
Genius Scan Free Version
- Emailing
- Wi-Fi Sharing
Genius Scan+
- iBooks
- Evernote
- Dropbox
- Google Docs
JotNot
- Fax
- Evernote
- WebDAV/iDisk (MobileMe)
- Google Docs
- Dropbox
- Box.net
DocScanner
- Evernote
- Dropbox
- Google Docs
- Wi-Fi Sharing
- Synchronization
Scanner Po
- iDisk/WebDAV (MobileMe)
- Dropbox
- Evernote
- Google Docs
- Wi-Fi
File Size
Here are the resulting file sizes for each app:
- JotNot: Magazine: 1.4Meg, B&W Doc: 590KB, Notebook: 594 KB
- Genius Scan: Magazine: 504KB, B&W Doc: 213KB, Notebook: 176KB
- DocScanner: Magazine: 516KB, B&W Doc: 340KB, Notebook: 229KB
- Scanner Pro: Magazine: 1.8Meg, B&W Doc: 541KB, Notebook: 606KB
Clearly Genius Scan resulted in the smallest files, but DocScanner is pretty good. You can download the PDFs and judge for yourself if the size savings are worth it.
OCR
Of these apps, only DocScanner supports Optical Character Recognition, which means it can make the document searchable.
Having said that, in my tests the results were pretty abysmal. If you want your resulting PDFs to be searchable from a mobile app, you are probably better off doing it on your computer or (if you are a Premium Member), sending it to Evernote.
Wrapup
There you go, a smackdown of four iPhone scanning apps. Of these, JotNot seems to score the highest most consistently, but also produces large files. Genius Scan gives good results and is free, but doesn’t have finely tuned adjustment options.
Do you use a mobile scanning app on the iPhone or Android? Which is your favorite, and what do you use it for?
(Photo by Gonzalo Baeza Hernandez)
