TurboScan 07/23/12

TurboScan turns your iPhone into a multipage scanner for documents, receipts, notes, whiteboards and other text.

A while back we wrote a hack that showed you How to Use Your iPhone as a Document Scanner.

Using the iPhone app Prizmo, we copied a block of text from a book on video editing, converted it into editable text and saved it into Evernote and DropBox.

Breakthroughs in OCR (optical character recognition) have made apps like these possible and increasingly popular.

Following up on a suggestion I received in the comments from Will, I checked out TurboScan. I found it to be much more reliable than Prizmo in giving me accurate scans quickly and easily.

Some of TurboScan’s noticeable features:

• uses advanced fast algorithms to auto-detect document edges, straighten the documents (correct perspective), eliminate shadows and set a perfect contrast.
• boasts a powerful yet easy to use interface. Get instant one-tap brightness, rotation and color controls all on one screen!
• offers SureScan, a proprietary scanning mode for sharper scans (especially useful in low-light conditions). SureScan requires taking three pictures of the same document with the iPhone camera.
• the handy “Email to myself” feature lets you send documents to a predefined address, or even upload them to online storage sites like Evernote, with a single tap.

 

 

 

The work-related uses for having a scanner in your pocket are obvious, but they are worth pointing out nonetheless:

• digitally archive business cards
• scan receipts from industry conference trips and turn them into PDFs
• convert handwritten production meeting notes
• turn whiteboard notes into a shareable PDF
• reduce the paper clutter in your edit suite or production office

And at $1.99, this has got to be the best bargain on the portable scanner market.