scanR is a free web-based service that accepts digital photos via email or mobile carrier, cleans up the image, and emails or faxes them to you or, at your direction, to another recipient.
I found scanR while writing the Cool Ways To Use Your Digital Camera Or Camera Phone post.
Using scanR
Photos of whiteboards are sent to wb@scanr.com; other documents are sent to doc@scanr.com. When I tested the service, I received a reply in less than two minutes.1 Attached to the reply will be an optimized PDF2 of the picture. One to ten photos may be emailed together; the single PDF file returned will include all the photos.
I sent this (as a jpg file):
And received this (as a PDF):
Sending Whiteboard & Documents To & From scanR
Images can be sent to scanR via E-mail, MMS, Mobile phone upload, or from ones Google homepage via Widget.
By default, scanR emails the resulting PDF to the senders address. The sender has the option for scanR to fax the resulting PDF to any fax number in the United States or Canada (except certain numbers such as 900 and other premium telephone numbers) or to any email address. A message may be included. The sending option is, however, limited to a single recipient (i.e., one can email the result to only one fax number or one email address; if sent to another recipient, the resulting PDF is not sent to the sender).
OCR
OCR (optical character recognition) is run on documents but, currently at least, not whiteboards. The OCR quality is not high enough to allow copying and pasting text from the PDF. Instead, the OCR results are embedded into the document. The importance is that, once the PDF is stashed somewhere on a hard drive, one can run a search for words and phrases within the document using a desktop application such as Yahoo! Desktop Search or Google Desktop Search. To test this, I sent a photo of a page of laser-printed copy, received the PDF, saved the PDF to my hard drive, allowed my Yahoo! Desktop Search to run its routine indexing overnight, and ran a search for a few words I knew were in the copy. From my hard drive’s thousands of documents, the desired document was easy to find.3
Requirements
Cameras with 1.3-megapixel resolution are required to record whiteboards; cameras with 2-megapixel resolution are needed for printed documents.
Uses
scanR proffers these suggestions for using their service:
Scan whiteboards instead of taking notes during a meeting
Share whiteboard notes with your classmates
Create digital copies of prototypes and designs made on whiteboards
Keep digital copies of checks
Email signed expense reports
Send notes to meeting attendees
Fax a contract while on the road
Save your tax forms digitally
Scan the cover of a book to help find it later
Copy classmate’s notes from a class you missed
Send real estate listings to your clients
Share ideas written on paper with a remote co-worker
Make copies without the trip to Kinko’s
Footnotes
- If you haven’t already signed up (free) on the web site, the first email you send will trigger a reply with instructions for activating an account.↩
- Noise is removed from the graphic, skewed orientations are aligned, and the contrast is adjusted.↩
- 259 documents matched the search criteria; the target was the first on the list when documents were ranked “by date created.” Adding a couple more terms to the search criteria would have also highlighted the desired document by eliminating similar items.↩
