Edward Munn rounds up the best apps for turning your smartphone into a pocket scanner
Office Lens (bit.ly/officelens408)
Microsoft’s Office Lens is the perfect app for scanning documents, notes or indeed anything that contains a lot of text. After opening the app, you can choose from four different modes – Document, Photo, Whiteboard and ‘Business card’ – to get the best scan possible.
Point the camera’s lens towards the document you want to capture and Office Lens will use a floating frame to outline the selection that it will capture. Once you’ve taken the picture, the app quickly processes it, correcting wonky perspective (even if you’ve taken the shot from quite an extreme angle) and enhancing the colours to make it look like a real scan. If the automatic selection accidentally cuts something off, you can manually re-crop it or simply store the scan as the uncropped original photo.
Office Lens lets you export your scans as Word, PowerPoint and PDF files, or you can export the image to your Gallery app. Choosing one of the Office formats has the added benefit of uploading the scan to Microsoft’s OneDrive, so it’s accessible from any of your devices.
Office Lens doesn’t simply embed an image file in a document; if you choose to save the scan as a Word file, the app’s OCR (optical character recognition) technology jumps into action and converts the text into a fully editable document. Exporting as a PowerPoint file, on the other hand, transforms handwritten lines into drawn objects that can then be resized, moved and edited.
We were amazed by how accurately text was converted when we exported our scan as a Word file; there were very few – if any – mistakes, and the different font sizes and styles were carried over. Also, having the file saved to OneDrive meant we could immediately open it on a PC.
The biggest drawback to Office Lens is that there’s no option to save multiple-page documents. Although the app is meant to recognise handwriting as well as printed text when exporting to a Word document, we found this unreliable.
For quick scans of documents, notes and even drawings, no app beats Office Lens. Its automatic enhancements, cloud backups and incredibly accurate OCR place it streets ahead of any of its rivals.
PDF Scanner Free (bit.ly/pdfscanner408)
Scanning documents with PDF Scanner Free is quick and easy. Simply tap the button to capture an image with your camera and, like Office Lens, the app will indicate its selection clearly on the screen. You can manually adjust this after the picture has been taken if anything has been cut off, and the app automatically corrects the scan’s perspective before letting you choose from four different filters – Gray, B&W, Document or High Enhance.
To convert a scan to editable text, tap the three-dot button and select OCR, then Start. You can then edit the text to correct any mistakes made by the converter before saving it to your device or sharing it.
Unlike our Gold Award winner, PDF Scanner lets you scan multiple pages to a single document, letting you run OCR on all the pages at once, or you can export them as a multiple-page PDF. There’s also a handy built-in editor you can use to add text, highlight sections and add a signature to your document.
PDF Scanner’s interface is not as polished or intuitive as either of our other award winners, and its scans appeared to be of a slightly lower quality. The free version of PDF Scanner is also supported by ads, which can be removed for £4.49.
PDF Scanner was the only app we tested that offered both multiplepage scanning and full OCR functionality for free. However, we found that Office Lens offers higher-quality scans and a more enjoyable user experience.
CamScanner (bit.ly/camscanner408)
CamScanner had the most polished design of all the apps we tested and using it was a real pleasure. After photographing the document you want to scan and confirming the app’s auto-selection, it quickly corrects your scan’s perspective and lets you choose from a range of enhancement filters including Auto, Lighten, Magic Colour, Grey Mode and B&W. There are also handy options to adjust brightness, contrast and detail, in case you’re not happy with the standard filters.
Once you’ve approved the scan, you can add notes, share it as a JPEG or PDF, and add more pages to create a multiple-page document. The app even offers a handy batch mode that lets you quickly capture multiple scans in a row.
CamScanner supports OCR and lets you search the pages of your document by the words they contain, but you’ll need to buy it (for £1.79) to edit or export this text on a page-bypage basis.
CamScanner’s confusing pricing includes both a paid-for app and a Premium subscription. The free version lacks high-quality scans and adds a watermark to multiple-page PDFs. Also, the app’s OCR results are less accurate than those of Office Lens.
The free version of CamScanner offers impressive performance and an excellent interface, but it is let down by its lack of features. We think you’re better off choosing one of our other award winners.
Text Fairy (bit.ly/textfairy408)
A lightweight, ad-free OCR scanner, Text Fairy lets you convert printed documents into editable text quickly and easily. However, we found its OCR results were less accurate than our award winners, particularly when we didn’t capture the image very close up. Because it’s an OCR scanner, Text Fairy is largely redundant if you want to scan pages with pictures.
Tiny Scanner (bit.ly/tinyscanner408)
Tiny Scanner is a fast, easy-to-use scanner that almost claimed our Bronze Award. It creates highquality digital scans of documents that you can share as PDFs or JPEGs. Like our award winners, it offers a range of filters to make the scans look just like the real thing. There’s support for multi-page scanning but, unfortunately, even the Pro verison of Tiny Scanner, which costs £4.19, doesn’t offer OCR.
Fast Scanner (bit.ly/fastscanner408)
Like Tiny Scanner, Fast Scanner lets you quickly scan multiple-page documents and convert them to PDF or JPEG files for sharing. There are a range of filters to choose from (including B&W, colour, photo and grey) to enhance the appearance of your scans, but again there’s no OCR tool and the app doesn’t correct your scans’ perspective. On top of this, the free version of Fast Scanner is supported by obtrusive advertising.