Scanbot (US$1.99) advertises it can pretty much eliminate your desktop scanner, and it's hard to argue with that. My colleague Steve Sande looked at an earlier version of Scanbot and was impressed (he scans all paperwork that comes into his home with Scanbot), as am I with this latest iteration. The app can image any document, whether it is one page or multiple pages, and get you a clear and usable scan quite quickly. Scanbot tells you to move closer if need be, or to check your perspective (move the iPhone or iPad more directly above the document) so nothing is warped. It then automatically snaps a photo, turns it into a PDF or JPEG file, and then uploads them to the cloud, saves to your camera roll, or allows sharing through mail and messaging apps.Supported cloud services include Dropbox, Box, Evernote, WebDAV, Yandex, Google Drive and a few others. Scanbot lets you turn color off for better images of black and white text, and it automatically enhances your text as well.
The developers say the new iPhones are going to work even better thanks to the improved camera in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and the larger screens of those phones will help you get the document focus and orientation better.
Scans are all 200 DPI or better. The only thing missing from Scanbot is OCR (optical character recognition) so you can turn your scanned document into editable text. But Scanbot offers a $4.99 in-app purchase for OCR. I bought the upgrade and tried it. The OCR feature worked well, but like most OCR'd text it needed some cleanup afterwards.
Scanbot is not the only mobile scanning software out there, but it works very well and is great for saving receipts, whiteboards, notes, sections of a book, anything really. It's fast and reliable, and does an outstanding job for a low cost, although adding OCR brings the total app cost to $6.99.
Scanbot supports many Asian and European languages, and it's universal. The app requires iOS 7 or after, and it worked smoothy under iOS 8.
If you do a lot of scanning, or just need an occasional quick scan to create a JPEG or PDF, Scanbot satisfies. Soon I'll be taking a look at a competing product, Prizmo, which offers similar features but at a higher price of $9.99
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