Post article image Picking a Scanner App — The Top Five Scanners for Mobile

Picking a Scanner App — The Top Five Scanners for Mobile

You don’t need a Canon scanner anymore to get a digital copy of a physical text. If your phone has at least a 12 megapixel camera, you can make scans of decent quality, avoiding a trip to the office or library. We present you the top 5 scanner apps for mobile that will revolutionize your documentation.

Scanner Pro

Scanner Pro is an iOS scanner app exclusively. And its feature palette is volcanic. First, it makes scans of a tremendous quality that will be partly lost if only you compress the images.

Second, there’s a ton of extra features. Like, the app can automatically remove the pesky shadows that sometimes appear when you scan a document. The images can be backed up via cloud storage — Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega, etc.

And if you want to extract the digital text from the scanned visuals, its OCR feature has got your back: it knows how to interpret the photographed symbols into letters and digits. Finally, you can convert the results into PDF or JPEG.

Scanner Pro app

Adobe Scan

Adobe Scan is a humble ferret compared to Scanner Pro. But it does a decent job too. It can photograph anything: from a school board with equations to business cards and yellowish pages of the antique books.

OCR is also on the menu, so you’re liberated from transcribing texts manually. Cloud support is present too, and you can back up and share scanned fruits of your labor in a flick. And what’s even better, this app is totally free. Plus, there’s a scanner app Android version. 

Microsoft Office Lens

Microsoft Office Lens is another freebie that reads and snaps texts. For an MS product, it works surprisingly well, and you’ll rarely have unrecognized symbols in your scans. (A common issue among the mobile scanner).

It has the standard feature portfolio: scanning, OCR, sharing. But what makes it especially good for work and study is that it’s by default linked to the likes of PowerPoint, Word, Excel and other popular office tools from MS.

So, preparing any documentation — reports, presentations, spreadsheets, charts, brand books — and illustrating it with a good quality scan is no problem with Office Lens at all. 

Notes

On iOS, Notes is a popular hub of productivity and file management. But some users are ignorant about its scanning feature. All you need to do is to tap Create a new note, tap the camera icon and choose Scan a document.

In turn, you’ll get a decent scan, which you can edit to your taste. This includes adding/reducing visual warmth, cropping it to highlight important excerpts, and so on. After fine-tuning is done, you can share/back up the file.

Google Drive

Google Drive isn’t a scanner app for mobile exactly. But it can do some basic scanning for free. Plus, you can tweak the image if there’s something off with it: rotation, cropping, changing color tonality, etc. And what’s cool, you can instantly save the files to the GD’s cloud storage.

Yes, We Scan!

These apps won’t let you miss any important info, be it a chemical formula, an excerpt from a rare book on Roman law or contact info of a potential business partner. You may also want to try TinyScanner, Scanbot and TurboScan — they are worthy alternatives.

simple scanner on a table

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