Our app of the week is actually one that we’ve been using for quite a while now, but it’s made its way up onto the App Store’s Best New Apps section this week so I thought we should take the time to do a little feature on it. CamScanner is, as the name sort of suggests, an app for scanning documents using your phone’s camera. By no means is it the only app on the app store that will do this, but we’re fairly certain it’s the best.
One of the best things about CamScanner is how simple it is to use. Once you’ve signed up for a free account you can get started straight away with scanning. Simply open the app and tap on the camera button, make sure you have all of the document in focus (this can take a few slow moves in and out) and hit the photo button again. The app will then allow you to set the outline of the document and resize it to fit the screen, so it doesn’t matter if you were slightly off center or get a bit of the table around the document – CamScanner will remove anything else and straighten it up for you. Once it’s done this, the app will export it as a PDF ready for you to email to someone else. You also get the option to annotate the document, share it with collaborators or just save it for later in your cloud storage which comes with the app.
There are three separate versions of CamScanner, the free, the pro and the plus version. All of which seem to have the same additional functions (extract text from documents (OCR), annotate documents with a range of pens, airprint and fax) except the free version restricts how freely you can use these features and will place a CamScanner watermark at the bottom of your document. A monthly subscription is available for even more features, including increased cloud storage, 40 more collaborators on your documents and no in app ads. This is probably one of the weakest features of CamScanner is quite how confusing this pricing system is, a free version or a subscription version would have been much better I think.
There’s not really a lot more to say about CamScanner, let’s be honest scanning documents isn’t the most exciting application ever. However if you need to scan documents on a regular basis and either don’t want to shell out on a printer or are on the move a lot and it would be impractical to take one around with you – CamScanner is an excellent app for you to download and use.