| REVIEWS: Best Document Scanner Apps for Android (2020) Posted: 08 Jan 2020 11:29 AM PST I have tried all top apps. And I took a good image with my phone camera (Huawei P30, one of the best cameras you can get), with uniform lightning, clean background, and then imported the same image into all apps. I then used the app controls to get the best results that each app could offer. After that, I copied the resulting PDF to my computer to zoom in and compare the scanner results, to see how well their algorithms did. This means that I gave all apps IDENTICAL input from my photo library, and I am a graphics pro, so this is a very deep and fair comparison of all apps. CAMSCANNER - Price: $50 per year. (Also has a useless "Free" version which has almost zero features and which inserts permanent CamScanner advertisements into your PDF files.)
- Was caught having a literal trojan in their software in 2019.
- They have released a statement saying they were victim of a bad advertising platform whose ad module contained a Trojan. They have removed the module, sued that ad company, and Google has done a thorough scan and let them back into Play Store. So they are safe now and were actually innocent all along.
- However, they have changed the app to subscription model: $10 per month instead of a fixed price! They've lowered it now to $50 per year. Still, at that price, you could buy a physical document scanner after just a few months! Didn't even waste my time trying it, knowing how expensive it is. But from what I can see, it seems to be on par with or better than Scanbot. If you are incredibly demanding and you need scans for your work, you may want to pay this price. Everyone else should choose a sanely priced application instead.
GOOGLE DRIVE - Price: Free (no ads).
- There is a "Scan" feature if you press the Plus sign. But it's way too basic. Lacks OCR and lacks ability to perfectly adjust image to get clean results. You could definitely use this app if you're in an emergency and need to borrow a friend's phone for scanning without installing anything on their device. But if you want great scans, you're gonna have to get a better app.
ADOBE SCAN - Price: Free (no ads, unless you consider generic "Buy our Adobe stuff!" to be ads).
- Cropping: Extremely good automated cropping. Doesn't need adjustment most of the time.
- Cleanup: This app lets you "paint" over unwanted elements on the scan, such as thumbs, etc, and it will magically use Photoshop-style filters to clean it up and remove it as if it was never there. Great. No other apps have this feature.
- Color Adjustments: Very basic. Only offers Original, Auto (app decides), Grayscale (no color), and Whiteboard (more contrast than grayscale mode). There is no manual control over brightness/contrast, so you cannot perfect the scans. You just have to pick a mode and pray that at least one of them looks good.
- Background Removal (Flat Backgrounds): Great.
- OCR: Very good.
- Output PDF Quality: EXTREMELY BAD. VERY LOW QUALITY (just 239kb file; the bigger the better quality). There is no quality control to save any higher filesizes. The whole document has a fuzzy, blurry look. If you zoom in, outlines of letters are super blurry and full of JPG compression artifacts. I believe they do this heavy, blurry compression to save disk space on their free cloud storage platform. It's sad. I will not be using Adobe Scan.
- Exporting: No third party integrations. Just uses the Android default "share" panel to send the file to target apps that support it, such as mail, messages, etc. Also lets you save the file to the local file system.
SCANBOT - Price: Free and Pro; the Pro is a one-time payment of $5.49 for a permanent Android license, which is a good idea to buy now if you like it, because in time they are probably gonna make it subscription based like on iOS for 25 dollars per year, and anyone who bought the permanent iOS version got to keep its features forever even after they changed to subscription.
- Cropping: Extremely good automated cropping. Doesn't need adjustment most of the time.
- Color Adjustments: Amazing. The free version only has a few presets, but the full version gives you full control over everything (saturation, brightness and contrast). So you can get great-looking results that fit any input material. It also has some "magic" color and text modes which ensure pure white background and crisp text no matter what!
- Background Removal (Flat Backgrounds): (FREE MODE) Good but not great. You will get some remaining background shade in everything except the "black and white" preset. (PRO MODE) AMAZINGLY GOOD! If you buy the pro version, you will be able to tweak brightness/contrast to fade away the background completely, to make it pure white. And its Magic Text (pro feature) mode takes away the background perfectly (even when gradients exist), while leaving beautiful, sharp, cleanly rounded text edges. There's a special "waterdrop" slider which automatically suctions away the background while leaving everything else intact. Those "Magic" modes are based on advanced filtering algorithms, which their team blogged about having spent weeks to learn from photo professionals and to develop in their app.
- OCR: Very good. And has tons of languages.
- Output PDF Quality (FREE): GOOD AND SHARP (511kb file, largest of all apps). Very clear and sharp letter outlines. Unfortunately you have to use the black and white mode to save a PDF without background image remnants in the free version, and this means that you get jagged outlines around letters because there are no gradients in B/W mode. So you would have to buy the pro version to get great quality text outlines with grayscale mode instead. However, you will only see the free version's jaggies if you zoom in. So for most people, the free version is all you need.
- Output PDF Quality (PRO VERSION): BEST OF ALL THE TESTED APPS!
- Additional info about PDF Quality: The app settings menu lets you choose anywhere from Low, Medium, High or Best quality. It defaults to Best. (Note that Adobe Scan's compression is the Medium quality choice in Scanbot, which is why Adobe Scan looks so awful.)
- Additional info about PDF Size: There is a built-in "PDF Optimizer" inside Scanbot. You can simply take your "511kb" high-quality PDF and tell it to Optimize, and you will get a result that has the exact same quality but about 60% smaller file (200kb in this example). It achieves this by optimizing away "dead space" (pure white background sections) in the PDF pages, and by utilizing PDF's lossless compression capabilities! Very neat feature!
- Exporting: Perfect. HUGE amount of integrations with 3rd party platforms. And lets you save to local storage if you want.
- Extras: The pro version of the app is full of document management (including searching and finding based on text inside OCR'd documents), FAX sending, and QR code scanning, annotating PDFs (typing/drawing/adding signatures), etc. It even has "Smart Naming" which generates document names based on your location (lists venues close to your location to let you pick a filename), time, calendar entries (lists names of events in your calendar to let you use those as filename), and any specific naming pattern templates that you've defined, meaning that you can get automatic filenames that accurately fit what you are doing at the time (such as "January 2020, Bookworm Conference.pdf") or whatever your preferred pattern is (such as "Year-Month-Day Filename.pdf"). It also offers "PDF Compression" which can reduce filesize by about 50-70%, by cutting away dead space on the images that make up the text of your pages. And it lets you edit PDFs at any time to add even more pages if you want to. And there's even a Reminder integration which can remind you to look at certain PDFs at certain dates and times. Seriously this is a swiss army knife.
- Privacy: Excellent. "No data in your documents will ever be sent to us or a 3rd party. Everything including the text recognition will be done directly on the device. We value privacy!"
TINY SCANNER - Price: Freeware with ad-free premium single-purchase version available. Included because it was often mentioned by people as an app they liked.
- Cropping: Bad. Needs manual adjustment almost every time. For example, this app thinks the left corners of a white paper on top of a black background, is somehow at the left edges of the black background instead of the clearly white paper. It's just baaad. You will need to do manual adjustment. Also, when you adjust, there is no auto-snapping to lines/edges, so it is way more tedious than other apps.
- Color Adjustments: Very good but not as good as Scanbot. You get three modes: Color, Grayscale, and Photo (high res colors). The Color and Grayscale modes have 5 dots that you can click on, which represent automatic settings for contrast and brightness. So you just click those dots until you find the choice that looks best with whatever you scanned. You get good looking contrast and brightness results.
- Background Removal (Flat Backgrounds): Very good.
- OCR: There is no OCR in this app. You can take the PDF file and OCR it manually on Mac/Windows via various freeware apps on those operating systems, if that is good enough for you.
- Output PDF Quality: ACCEPTABLE (better than Adobe Scan but worse than Scanbot). 393kb file. The outlines in "black and white" mode are less jagged than Scanbot (FREE VERSION NOT PRO, PRO FIXES THAT AS MENTIONED). However, the "color" mode (which preserves smooth gradients) actually has very pixelated outlines too, which is very surprising. They must be doing severe post-processing to sharpen the heck out of the image, which would explain the constant jagged edges. And the color mode also introduces unwanted colors in black and white documents, such as black areas becoming semi-red, etc. I would not use this app for these reasons. There is no way to get high quality, sharp outlines without jaggies in this app.
- Exporting: You can choose between Large, Medium or Small files (which affects quality and thereby filesize). And has built-in integrations for a few common platforms (Dropbox, Evernote, Drive, Box, OneDrive). It also has the default android share panel. IT HAS NO WAY TO SAVE TO THE LOCAL FILE SYSTEM, which is a letdown...
NOTEBLOC - Price: Free, ad-supported. There is a premium single-purchase version to remove ads; made by a company that makes notebooks, so this is meant as their free companion app and they have promised to keep it free always.
- Cropping: Good, although a bit over-aggressive, usually pointing inside the document by a fair margin, so you will need to adjust the corners.
- Color Adjustments: Super bad. You choose mode between Photo, Document or Noteblock, and then you choose if you want Color or Black/White. There are zero fine-tuning controls.
- Background Removal (Flat Backgrounds): Great if you have even, clean lighting and use the phone's flashlight. But if there is too much shading on your paper, this app will fail and since there are no manual brightness/contrast controls, you cannot fix it. Meh. However, when you DO have great lighting, this app is magical. It clearly has a smart background removal algorithm. It was the only app that cleanly preserved a VERY FAINT writing on my paper (nearly white writing), while still removing 100% of the background. All other apps faded out/totally removed that faint writing! So that was very impressive. (However, the Pro version of Scanbot was able to preserve that writing too, either in a faded form if you wanted a pure white background in general, or as fully preserved and clear if you were okay with some of the general background shade remaining in the corners of the document. Still, Notebloc definitely won in this department, with this tricky example.)
- OCR: Very good.
- Output PDF Quality: AMAZINGLY GOOD QUALITY. The file is 384kb. All outlines are very smooth and beautifully rounded. The text itself is very sharp and clear. It's absolutely perfect.
- Exporting: Interesting to say the least; you can export as PDF, TXT (ocr result), or JPG. Sadly its integrations are non-existent and it only lets you share to standard android locations (google drive, supported apps, messages, etc). There is no direct export to the file system, sigh.
- NOTE FOR GOOGLE PLAY PASS USERS: As pointed out in a comment, if you have Google Play Pass, you will not see any ads in the app, since it participates in the Play Pass system.
- ADDITIONAL NOTES: It was discovered that Notebloc (which has grown in popularity lately and kept coming up in user recommendations) actually buys their software from a company that has existed for longer, named "Clear Scan" (created by "Indy Mobile"). You can download either "Notebloc" or "Clear Scan"; they are the same exact application, just differently branded. I will not rewrite this review and all references to Notebloc. It's up to you to choose one. They are the same. However, it's likely that only Notebloc participates in the ad-free "Google Play Pass" mentioned above. So if you're a Play Pass user, you'll want to download Notebloc instead.
Honorable(?) Mention: MICROSOFT OFFICE LENS. - Price: Free.
- [Update: This section is outdated. My test results are now at the bottom of this section.] I personally skipped testing this because it requires a Microsoft OneDrive account (update: turns out they've removed that requirement), and because it's known for being a pretty bad scanner, so I knew it would never win the test and didn't want to go through the hassle. But I've added these notes here on request from two readers. Since I have not tested the app personally, I cannot comment on its PDF output quality, but can only relay information that was possible to gather from reviews and my own research.
- Page captures by Office Lens are not clean and have noise in the background. The noise is mentioned in many user reviews and is even visible in Microsoft's promo photos on the app store, which have a dirty, pixelated, brown-yellowish background tint. Straight in their own promo photos! (Update: Several people have confirmed this in the comments to this review.)
- It is also known for being bad at border detection. You have to move the camera around until it properly detects the borders, which is annoying. (Update: Several people have confirmed this in the comments to this review.)
- People also complain that it can only scan max 20 pages per PDF you generate, which is a severe limitation if you need to scan long documents.
- The app also refuses to let you save PDFs locally, and instead forces you to save them to the OneDrive cloud.
- According to a reader, these criticisms are correct, but says that despite all of this, the app is actually great at extreme-angle perspective correction. So if you are photographing a whiteboard in a classroom while you're sitting in your seat, or something like that, then it could be worth trying Office Lens for that purpose. But if you are only shooting regular pieces of paper at a typical straight/minor angle (scanning things you can easily stand in front of), then all applications on this list will do a great job with the perspective correction!
- UPDATE: I have now performed the same test with Office Lens due to people's curiosity (and some arguing) in the comments below. I gave it the exact same input image as all other applications. Yikes... it's incredibly bad. People weren't joking when their reviews said that Office Lens has noisy backgrounds. It's utterly useless. But perhaps it has other values as something other than a paper-document scanner, because it's awful at that. Scans should have pure backgrounds, to give clean printouts later, as well as to improve file compression. Office Lens' results are the worst I have ever seen. It looks like the paper has acne. It is utterly awful. The backgrounds are noisy, exactly like tons of Google Play reviews (and other comments in this thread) have pointed out. Here are the results: Scanbot Pro: https://i.imgur.com/RkB68eE.png (pure white background), Office Lens: https://i.imgur.com/GY7bPiD.png (splotchy, pink background).
What is my final verdict? - The OCR of all apps is pretty much identical. Got every word correctly in a large Swedish document.
- Adobe Scan is totally worthless. Seriously crap. It compresses the PDF so insanely heavily that you only get a super blurry mess. It's awful. Sure, it has the nice "object removal" feature, but that's the ONLY unique value it has. Everything else is awful. And it forces you to make an Adobe Document Cloud account and store all your docs online at their server. This is most likely the reason why the file quality is so bad (they overcompress with garbage-quality to save their own online disk space). This could become good in the future if they ever offer a high-quality offline storage mode instead.
- Notebloc is free and gives the absolute BEST scan results (PDF files) out-of-the-box of all the free apps (but does not beat Scanbot Pro), and contains free OCR. Sadly I wish it had manual brightness/contrast controls to fix unoptimal scans, and a way to save to the local file system. Then it would be perfect.
- Tiny Scanner is pointless. It doesn't offer the best scan quality and does not offer OCR. So if you want something free that's better than this, you should get Notebloc instead. It also has very intrusive ads.
- Scanbot is incredible. I do NOT recommend the free version (get Notebloc instead, if you want something for free). But you SHOULD buy the Pro version. For around 5 dollars you get a lifetime Pro license on Android (read my notes above about iOS and the future of this app on Android). The Pro mode gives you the most advanced brightness/contrast of all apps, which lets you achieve perfect results on ANY photo no matter how bad your light is in your input photo. The "Magic Text" algorithm also guarantees the best text clarity of ALL tested apps. It also has the most advanced background removal algorithms (the Magic modes, in the Pro version). And it offers the most app integrations and features of all apps here. And they are continuously developing the app to add more and more features.
TL;DR: You want free? Get Notebloc. You want to pay to get the best app with a fair price? Get Scanbot on Android, and take your chance to buy it now before they raise the price (like they did on iOS). I hope all my hours of research and testing helps someone! submitted by /u/svartchimpans [link] [comments] |
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