CamScanner for Apple and Android

This guest post by Oliver Jenkins, a freshman in SEAS and Wharton, describes an app that could help with studying and notetaking:

Hi everyone! I’m here with a great app for iOS and Android which has gotten some recent changes which have made it quite excellent. Best of all, with a .edu email address, the full version (normally $5) is free!

Anyway, CamScanner is an app that uses the camera on your phone or tablet to turn your device into a full-fledged scanner which is in many ways more convenient to use than a traditional desktop scanner. You simply take a picture of the document (or book, or magazine, or poster, or really anything flat with words on it) to be scanned and the app will automatically detect the edges of the page, crop out the background, rescale the image so you get an even rectangular page (even if the picture was at an angle), and enhance it so that words and figures are clear and easy to read. This gives you a high contrast and crisp scan, unlike a normal scanner which can often yield blurry or grayed out images.

CamScanner

More importantly, once the document is on the device you can do wide variety of things with it. Multiple scans are easy to organize into documents and documents can be sorted by category (for example by class, semester, school, etc.). You can also share the documents very easily over email or through a wide variety of document based apps such as Dropbox, Notability, Evernote, or Google Drive. You can even send them as a fax!

In sum, CamScanner is a perfect example of an app which not only puts a function in your device which used to require an entire separate machine but also goes farther by being much more user friendly and useful than the machine it replaced! I highly recommend this (free!) app to anyone with an iOS or Android device.

About Me: I am a student in the M&T program studying Mechanical Engineering, Finance, and Operations. I love technology and am a strong supporter of using modern tech in the classroom for educational purposes, even including going without physical paper of any kind. If you have any followup questions, feel free to shoot me an email at ojenkins@wharton.upenn.edu!