Sometimes you see a text or document, on a TV, a board, your printed documents or your friend’s note, and you need to save them for future uses. The first solution pops up, is to take picture via your smartphone and save it to your gallery. But this solution has its own drawbacks, like: Poor quality most of the time, Distortion due to bad camera angles, Needs to be cropped to delete extra parts and adjust the edges, Brightness is not good enough for reading later and some other things. Well, since we expect our smartphone to be capable of doing almost everything, why not use it as a scanner?
Here are 3 best apps to use Android as Scanner for scanning documents with the camera of your device and save a digital copy of scanned files even on cloud storage services:
1. CamScanner -Phone PDF Creator
CamScanner is without doubt the best Android Scanner App which is free to download and use. You can easily make a digital copy of every document, notes, and books with very high quality. Documents are saved in both JPG and PDF and it crops extra parts of the picture with available tools automatically. You can change the quality and brightness to export the best possible result. OCR feature makes it possible to search through scanned files and creating an account makes it possible to access your documents from different devices logged in with the same user name. Some of modifying options of CamScanner are: Adding some notes and adding watermarks.
When we first used this application for scanning some documents, we were really surprised by the quality of final files.
Download CamScanner from Google Play
There is also a tablet friendly version of this application, called CamScanner HD, which turns your Android tablet to a powerful scanner. It supports Google Cloud Print and uploading to cloud storage services.
2. Scan to PDF
This is a simple and easy to use Scanner app which saves the scanned PDF files to SD Card or Google Drive. After taking the picture, you may adjust the edges, set the orientation to portrait or landscape, and choose the paper size: A3, A4, A5, B4, B5, Letter, Legal, or Executive.
Download Scan to PDF from Google Play
Speaking of Google Drive, did you know that Google Drive is also able to scan your files? When you go to Add New menu, you need to choose Scan and continue the process. Since it is synced with your Google account, you will have your files everywhere.
3. Droid Scan Pro PDF
Unlike other 3 services we reviewed, this is a paid scanner app which provides so many features. After scanning your files, adjusting the edges and cropping unnecessary parts, you can save them to Jpeg or PDF. Like CamScanner, this application has a built-in OCR feature to search the documents and syncing your files with cloud storage services is possible too. Droid Scan is really fast and we can call its speed as one of the main features of this application.
If you are looking for a simple Android scanner app with limited features, then both Scan to PDF and Google Drive are good choices, but we would go for Google Drive because of its integration with other Google services. On the other side, we have CamScanner with so many features that turns your Android device (both phone and tablet) to a professional scanner.
