Printer scene from "Office Space" (1999)
Keeping invoices, compiling learning documents, collecting and forwarding expenses? You don't need a space-consuming multifunction printer or an expensive scanner. With your smartphone and a scanning app, you can quickly photograph all your private documents, regardless of location, view them at any time and easily share them with other people. We have now tested again what the current apps can do and where the subtle differences lie. Here are the eight best Android and iOS scanning apps for private use:
In our test, all eight apps delivered good scan quality. The scanning process is always similar and uncomplicated:
The desired document is photographed with the app. It is advisable to choose a scanning surface that contrasts in colour with the paper document. This makes it easier to recognise the edges of the document and automatically crop the image. The scanning apps are designed to compensate for poor lighting conditions and oblique shooting angles. They therefore deliver much more than a simple mobile phone camera could do on its own. After scanning, you can rotate the documents, rename them and decide whether the document should be saved as a black-and-white scan, in colour or as a photo. Afterwards, all scans are displayed in an overview.
With all apps, you can create multi-page documents just as easily. It is not even necessary to scan all pages in one process. Any number of scans can be added to each document afterwards. The documents can be exported to various popular cloud services, sent as an email or saved in other apps. By the way, almost every scan app is also available as a free version with limited functions.
Download: /
free
CamScanner
What can CamScanner do? With CamScanner you can scan, save, share and synchronise your private documents on different devices in just a few steps. Thanks to intelligent cropping and automatic enhancements, texts and images are displayed sharply and legibly. Tags allow you to quickly find all saved documents. With the text analysis (OCR) integrated in the premium version of CamScanner, texts can be extracted for further processing or forwarding. In the premium version, important documents can also be protected from unauthorised access by a password.
Download:
free of charge
Scannable
What can Scannable do? With Scannable you can scan your documents very quickly and then forward them or open them with different apps. During the scanning process, the app immediately recognises the different types of documents, such as contracts, receipts or book pages. An additional feature that sets the app apart from others is the special handling of business cards: Scannable supplements the business card information with details from the contact's LinkedIn profile and thus enables a comprehensive address book entry.
Download:
Price: 2,99€
Doc Scan Pro
What does Doc Scan Pro do? The app stands out with its Curled Paper feature, which allows you to scan curved sheets and book pages. After scanning, you can make coloured marks and annotations and save the documents in folders. The highlight: all documents and folders can be protected from unauthorised access with a password.
Download: /
Price: 6,99€
Genius Scan
What can Genius Scan+ do? Genius Scan+ creates high-quality colour and black-and-white scans. Even in poor lighting conditions or at a severe angle to the photographed document, the app exhibits optimal scan quality. This makes the scans ideally suited for permanent digital archiving with other services. A practical tag function is integrated in the iOS version of the scan app, which greatly simplifies searching and management. The advantage: the tags can be transferred to Evernote after an upload.
Download:
Price: 4,99€
MDScan Pro
What can MDScan Pro do? With the helpful batch mode, you can easily manage even larger stacks of paper. Single pages can be scanned quickly one after the other. The Mobile Doc Scanner allows you to save already saved documents as black and white scans, colour scans or in a new file size without any loss of quality. With the app, you can save your scans directly to your smartphone or SD card, so they are always at hand.
Download: /
free
Scanbot
What can Scanbot do? With Scanbot you can create very high-quality scans in seconds. An automatic upload, for example to Evernote, brings your digitised documents directly to a place where you can archive them. The scans can be provided with coloured markings and annotations. The option to add your own signatures is particularly interesting. The upgrade to the Pro version is available as an in-app purchase and includes text recognition.
Download:
Price: 2,99€
Scanner Pro
What can Scanner Pro do? Scanner Pro is user-friendly and can be operated in just a few steps. The app delivers high-quality scans, reproduces texts in very good quality and is therefore particularly suitable for scanning longer texts, such as books. You can later archive the scanned documents in folders and save them on your smartphone. A special feature of the app is the scan radar. It also searches the photo library for photographed documents and imports them into the app. This means that documents photographed with the mobile phone camera are not lost.
Download:
Price: 2,99€
SharpScan Pro
What can SharpScan Pro do? The OCR integrated in SharpScan reliably recognises texts in over 50 languages. If you want to forward a single text excerpt from a document, this saves you tedious work. After scanning or uploading a digital document, you select the desired language. The text of a document can then be extracted and shared.
Download: /
Price: 4,99€ (iOS) 3,99€ (Android)
TinyScan Pro
What can TinyScan Pro do? TinyScan combines all the important functions with a high degree of user-friendliness and offers high-quality scanning. As the scanning app is very intuitive to use, you will be guided quickly through all steps of a scanning process. TinyScan offers a batch mode that allows you to quickly scan a large batch of documents and merge them into one PDF document.
The apps presented above are mainly all-rounders that cover as broad a field of application as possible. If you are looking for special scanners, it is worth searching with an app search engine such as Knicket. With the help of several search terms, search options and tags, you can search for QR scanners, label scanners, business card scanners, etc. depending on the platform.
You can also digitise your documents with fileee. But our app can do much more, because fileee is designed to permanently archive your digital text documents and support you in your document-related tasks: After you have scanned your documents, fileee analyses them to show you important information. With an extensive search function, you can search for documents and within documents for details. To eliminate the chaos between digital and paper documents, fileee allows you to automatically import digital documents that you regularly receive. To do this, simply link fileee to your email account.
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