Here’s a list of 5 free scanner apps for Android which you can use to scan documents using your phones or your tablets camera. Modern Android devices have very powerful cameras and they are getting better and better each day. This turns them into a relatively decent replacement for a scanner, but you need the right app to create for example PDF documents out of the scanned documents. That and much more are what the following apps from the list are for.
Mobile Doc Scanner Lite
Mobile Doc Scanner Lite is a free and somewhat limited version of Mobile Doc Scanner. Lite version has ads, lets you scan up to 4 documents in batch mode and has a couple of other limitations.
Features on the other hand are much more impressive. Scanned images can be saved to projects (when you scan several pages of a single document) and they can also be exported as PDF. Full processing mode lets you tweak the image that you process, improve colors, turn them to black and white, basically everything that an actual desktop scanner application would let you do.
PDF Document Scanner
PDF Document Scanner, unlike Mobile Doc Scanner, is a completely free ads funded app that offers pretty much the same functionalities that Mobile Scanner Lite does, only there are no restrictions of any kind.
This scanner app lets you create single page scans or alternatively you can create projects. A project lets you take multiple scans (using your phones default camera app) and then mix those scans into a multipage PDF document. Image above shows the image processor where you can crop scans and apply dozens of different image effects to it before exporting it to a PDF document.
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CamScanner -Phone PDF Creator
There’s actually several versions of CamScanner, optimized for phones, tablets, etc. It seems that our streak with finding better and better scanner apps continues, because CamScanner surprised us with one very interesting feature, OCR or optical character recognition.
What this means is that it will read out the text from scans and make the text editable, instead of just images. All the other features mentioned up until now are included, scan processing, collections, projects. There’s also an option for registering an account with CamScanner, upload documents and then collaborate with other people who are also using CamScanner.
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Handy Scanner Free PDF Creator
With Handy Scanner Free PDF Creator is a simpler scanner app for Android, simpler but still very powerful.
So what exactly makes Handy Scanner simple. To create a multi page project, for example, you just have to keep taking photos with your camera. Images are then opened in the image processor one by one where you can apply tweaks before saving them in a multipage PDF document. There’s no OCR, cloud accounts, or anything like that.
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My Scans, PDF Document Scanner
My Scans is basically just like Handy Scanner, only it has much smoother and easier to understand interface.
Image above shows the taking of a scan. Notice the counter in the bottom right corner which tells you how many scans you’ve created. That’s how multi-page PDF docs are setup. Just keep taking “scans” and then you’ll process each of them. At the end of setup you combine processed scans in a PDF.
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Conclusion
We’ll keep our conclusion short. For obvious reasons if you need more advanced features our of your document scanner app, use CamScanner. For everything else, there’s My Scans.
