Editor’s Pick of the Week: CamScanner

Welcome to the first edition of Editor’s Pick of the Week. From now on, every week, our editors will write about a service or app they are passionate about or use on a day-to-day basis. 

Often a situtation arises that one would want to scan a document but has no scanner available nearby and unwillingly has to take an actual photocopy of the same since photocopy machines are available easily while scanners are not (because you need a computer to save scanned data, but a photcopier outputs it on paper). Moreover, I would also point out that photocopies use paper: destroying trees, so it’s not environment friendly. I wouldn’t say a computer is environment friendly either, because there are a lot of factors to considered.

These days, a smartphone has become a common device, so common that people may not have laptops or desktops but have smartphones which come with good cameras (well, mostly). So there is the key to our problem: we can take photographs of the documents to be scanned. It’s essentially the same thing: you have the document in digital format; the only difference being that it is not properly processed as a scanned document might be. And since it’s a photograph you can obviously take it at different angles, again impairing the visibility.

So there’s this handy application for smartphones (iOS, Android) called CamScanner which can enhance such photographs so well that a person can barely point out the difference between an actually scanned document and the output of this app. You can have PDFs (which means you can scan a multipage document into a PDF) or save individual processed images or both.

I’m a student of Engg in India, and it is a religion to copy practical journals, simply because it involves too much effort to think and write it by hand. I used to take photographs and real photocopies of the documents earlier and then came to know about CamScanner from — I guess you know where — the Internet. After a few uses, I was so impressed that I bought the pro version (because most of the documents I required to scan had multiple pages).

Now, all I do is use the app to scan documents (or rather, copying material) and it works out way cheaper and cleaner for me than photocopying it.

The application is very feature rich (not an exhaustive list):

  • Single & Multiple Page Documents
  • Document tagging (for grouping)
  • Facility to share a document
  • Uploading to cloud storage (GDrive, Box and Dropbox)
  • Google Cloud Print: If you have printers connected to Google Cloud, you can directly print them.
  • Various image enhancement options

If you need to scan a lot of documents, CamScanner is a must-have app for you. Do make sure that your phone has a decent camera, otherwise the app will have trouble in properly recognizing the contents of the document you are scanning.

Download CamScanner for Android from Play Store and for iOS from iTunes App Store.