# Group test: find the best iPhone document scanner

We’re old enough to remember when scanners were huge, lumbering beasts — clunky beige contraptions with massive SCSI leads tethering them to a PC or Mac. Today’s scanners are comparatively svelte, although size reductions have been limited by paper documents: most flatbed scanners are at least A4/US letter sized, and feed scanners are somewhat wider than the width of one of those paper types.

But there is — in theory — a better way: use your iPhone. Any reasonably recent iPhone has a perfectly decent camera that’s capable of picking out the fine details from any document you snap. It’s then down to software to interpret everything. And that’s the purpose of this group test. Even Camera can take a photo of a business card, receipt or document and save it for posterity. But which apps can do more?

During testing, then, we were looking for apps that could make the job of scanning easier through edge detection and clean-up. Bonus points were awarded for the means to scan multi-page documents and extract text via OCR (Optical Character Recognition). After all, a picture of a document is all very well, but being able to copy and paste the text from it is better. Each app was tested against a range of documents: a business card; a book with serif type; a document; a till receipt; and a document with fairly bold sans-serif text. In all cases, lighting was reasonable rather than perfect, in an attempt to duplicate typical conditions when scanning, rather than the ideal.

## Scanbot Pro

**Free + IAP • v4.4.0 • 51.2 MB • doo GmbH**

**[Download Scanbot Pro](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/scanbot-document-scanner-qr/id834854351?mt=8)**

From the off, it’s clear Scanbot wants to be the friendly face of document scanning. The icon smiles, and both interface and worklow are straightforward. This is an app that wants to make things easier for everyone — and that’s OK by us.

In its free incarnation, you can scan, enhance and upload single or multi-page documents. Pay $4.99/£3.99 and you unlock the ‘pro’ mode that adds OCR, the means to add to existing saved scans, and actions based on information found within your scans.

Edge-detection proved impressive during testing, quickly updating if we moved our iPhone, and only getting things wrong if the hand holding the iPhone was moving. The subsequent editing screen is excellent, providing five alternate colour modes, manual cropping adjustment, and two rotation buttons. On saving a document, it can be sent to all manner of cloud services, local Photos storage, or shared via email. Annoyingly, colour and cropping edits cannot later be made after it’s been saved, which seems like an oversight.

The app’s OCR capabilities varied between quite impressive (occasionally missing a line or two from a book, or getting URLs wrong) to near perfect. Text can be copied from shared PDFs or in-app by selecting the scan, tapping the ‘⋮’ button at the top-right and then Copy. That’s a bit opaque, but fine once you know it. More of a black mark is the lack of editing for actions (telephone numbers; URLs; email addresses) Scanbot assigns to documents left inside the app, based on their content.


## Scanner Pro by Readdle

**$4.99/£3.99 • v6.1.2 • 74.2 MB • Readdle**

**[Download Scanner Pro](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/scanner-pro-by-readdle-scan/id333710667?mt=8)**

Readdle’s app lacks Scanbot’s quirkiness, and is a very much more businesslike affair. Its edge detection is suitably responsive and quite accurate, and it’s easy to take several shots to compose a multi-page document.

After making a scan, it can immediately be shared and discarded, if you don’t want it to stick around. Tapping the scan provides editing options, which feels a bit hidden, but is fine when you know they are there. On offer are four colour settings, brightness and contrast sliders, a rotation button, and a paper size indicator. The last of those is good for helping the app not have to guess at document sizes, but the rest of the tools could be more efficient.

When you’re done, scans are by default saved within the app but can also be shared anywhere. The documents screen has large and inviting thumbnails that make it easy to grab a previously saved item without bothering with filenames. There’s also a curious ‘radar’ option that trawls your entire Photo Library and shows what’s scannable. A pity, then, that the app currently lacks OCR functionality, thereby making the radar idea rather less useful.


## Evernote Scannable

**Free • v2.0.1 • 38.5 MB • Evernote**

**[Download Evernote Scannable](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/evernote-scannable/id883338188?mt=8)**

More or less an extension of online memory bin Evernote, Scannable is a super-fast and free way to get scans on to your iPhone and elsewhere. Its edge-detection and snapping don’t hang around, very quickly providing you with a scan to work with. 

After that point, everything’s a bit more limited, though. Built-in tools, accessed by way of a tiny settings button, merely give you a single (and sluggish) rotate option, manual cropping, and a toggle between the original and ‘enhanced’ colours. Fortunately, Scannable generally makes a good job of the latter.

You can then send (Mail, Share) or save (Camera Roll, Evernote) your documents. After doing so, be mindful tapping Done will delete your scan, ready for the next. ‘Back’ is the correct button should you wish to perform a second action. Unlike most of its rivals, Scannable exports documents to PNG rather than PDF. The upshot is smaller files, but there’s no means of text extraction from these files, nor is there within the app itself. 

Business Cards are an exception, however. Delve into the app’s options (… > Settings) and you can activate automated contact creation. Wisely, details can be edited and updated, and whenever you tap on a specific detail, the app zooms into the relevant part of the scan, so you can check.


## PDFpen Scan+

**$6.99/£4.99 • v2.1 • 40.3 MB • SmileOnMyMac, LLC**

**[Download PDFpen Scan+](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pdfpen-scan+-ocr-pdf-text/id685513192?mt=8)**

PDFpen has a great reputation on desktop, but on iPhone the experience is variable. Making scans is simple, with great automated edge detection, but this is oddly twinned with automatic snapping, making it too easy to accidentally take several images in a row, rather than just one. Turn off automated functions and your scans end up as photos of the document and its surroundings. 

Edge detection and cropping is subsequently available in an editing screen, but that seems a long-winded process compared to the likes of Scanbot Pro. Additionally, colour correction is added in destructive fashion, meaning you cannot get back to your original scan when things go wrong. A few twiddles and it’s easy to end up with entirely blank documents that you cannot recover. 

A redeeming feature of the app is its OCR functionality. The text can be overlaid on the original scan, making comparison extremely simple. From OCR buttons, you can also very quickly get at a copy command, ready for pasting elsewhere. Accuracy was fairly good — inferior to Scanbot Pro on a book’s page but a little better on the document with sans-serif text — but it’s too little, too late, especially given the relatively high price.


## CamScanner

**From free • v3.8.2 • 51.9 MB • INTSIG Information Co.,Ltd**

**[Download CamScanner](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/camscanner-free-pdf-document/id388627783?mt=8)**

CamScanner’s a bit of an odd one, given that, from what we can tell, there are at least four versions of it on the App Store. Three are for the iPhone: CamScanner Free, CamScanner+, and CamScanner Pro. The free version is ad-supported and unsubtly burns ‘Scanned by CamScanner’ into every exported scan, but is sufficient for seeing whether you’ll want to use the app properly by upgrading to CamScanner+ (which seems identical to Pro). There’s also a subscription service, which we’ll get to in a bit.

Basics first, and there CamScanner does well. Scans are fast, and the subsequent editing screen is efficient, quickly auto-cropping and providing two rotation buttons. The selection of colour options is on par with Scanbot, and there’s a pop-up menu for adjusting brightness and contrast levels. You can at any point go back into a scan and re-edit your settings.

OCR is quite accurate on the whole regardless of document type — at least as long as the scan is good and the document flat — but you’ll need the paid app to export any text. Annoyingly, quickly emailing just text output requires subscribing to the premium service ($4.99/£3.99 per month), which also adds ‘doc collage for multiple pages’, uploads to additional services, and some other benefits. This overall package is fine, but there’s little point paying every month what equally priced pay-once apps do just as well.


## Prizmo

**$9.99/£7.99 • v4.1.3 • 55.0 MB • Creaceed SPRL**

**[Download Prizmo](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/prizmo-scanning-ocr-speech/id366791896?mt=8)**

The most expensive app on test is also arguably the most feature-rich. Prizmo isn’t only about scanning, but super-fast OCR conversion and also text-to-speech.

Basics are ably dealt with. Page detection works well, and if you hold the capture button, the app waits until the iPhone is still before taking a shot. Three types of document are recognised: text, image and (business) card, and these can be rotated, cropped, and have adjusted colours and brightness/contrast.

The app’s ‘recognize’ feature is where the fun begins. It’ll grab text from scans, and you can then translate everything into a foreign language, or have the app read the text aloud. Export of extracted text is swift, and Prizmo can speed this process along further if you use the while scanning instead use the Capture Text button. Post-cropping, this then jumps right to OCR and text output. Alas, we found during testing that the accuracy wasn’t quite as good as Scanbot’s, even if we preferred this app’s workflow.

Prizmo’s far less successful when it comes to business cards. We found it almost never intelligently assigned information, and although you can manually stitch things together, it hardly seemed worth the hassle when Scannable did much the same thing with zero effort on our part.


## And the winner is…
 
We liked Prizmo a lot. It has a smart interface that tries to do an awful lot, and mostly succeeds without being too cluttered. It OCR features are really handy. CamScanner’s also got plenty going for it, not least the re-edit functionality. However, both are pricier and boast worse OCR accuracy than Scanbot, which also — on the whole — has a superior interface.

There are shortcomings to Scanbot, most notably the inability to make cropping and colour edits to saved documents, but its features, price, and nudge the paid version ahead of its rivals. For free, the more limited version of Scanbot is a good bet, too, not least because of its excellent sharing options, but we reckon Evernote Scannable also deserves a nod. It might be a bit too simple, but it’s fast and has by far the most intelligent handling of scanned business cards.