USE YOUR PHONE AS A SCANNER

Miniature scanners save lives. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond used a “mini-scanner” to copy nefarious plans indicating where the “Angels of Death” were to release a biological agent preventing the deaths of innumerable helpless civilians.

This app, CamScanner Free, enables you to do almost the same with your smartphone or other mobile devices. Just run this app, aim your device’s camera at any text or graphics, and then press the “Capture” button.

The app suggests a part of the image for cropping, which I find consistently correct, and after cropping, the image is enlarged with surprisingly little loss of detail. Better still, you can use its built-in editor to rotate a picture, enhance color, add notes to an image and give it a title. Depending on your device, you can also adjust details, brightness and contrast of the image.

This is fantastic because you see some of these features are often left out in conventional scanners.

After editing, you can save pictures into a document which acts like an album, with tags. But much to my disappointment, a picture can't stand alone and it has to place inside a document. You may have to name a singular image as well as the document it is in. Obnoxious, isn't it?

That said, the nicest thing about this app is that you can export your documents into PDFs and share them in many ways, either upload to your Google account, email, or fax it. The app charges you to use the fax function though.

The exported PDF is usually the size of the image which was scanned. However, if you scan something large like a textbook page, you will see a shrink in the PDF; the text remains legible depending on the way you scanned. In my use of this app with the iPhone 4, it worked equally well with both written and typed text when I captured a document roughly 8 inches away from the camera. The scanning process is quick.

This app is free with ads and other limitations such as watermarking your exported PDFs at the bottom right corner, but overall, it's far more effective and painless to use than a conventional scanner.

CamScanner Free — Free Android / iOS App of the Week

For iPhone (compatible with iPad & iPod touch)
Size: 13.6 MB
Download: http://itunes.apple.com/app/camscanner-free/id388627783?mt=8

For Android
Size: 7.9 MB
Download: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intsig.camscanner

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