Smartphone cameras can be used in many ways beyond just taking pictures. One of them is scanning receipts and documents. There are quite a few scanner apps available on both iOS and Android platforms. However, I found CamScanner and Google Drive quite worthy and shortlisted them for this tutorial. Recently, I’ve been busy migrating my data and apps to the Google ecosystem.
Earlier, I covered why I switched from Dropbox to Google Drive. Today, we’re going to take a look at CamScanner and see how it compares to Google Drive’s scanning feature.
CamScanner was built from the ground up to be used for scanning documents and receipts.
On the other hand, Google Drive is primarily a cloud storage platform that also offers some office applications including document scanning.
1. How to get started
When you install CamScanner for the first time, you need to create an account. There are no social login options available. Once you do that, you’ll be greeted with a beautiful and fully functional interface. There is a scan button at the bottom of the screen. When you click on it, you will see several options like PPT, Document, ID Card, etc. Choose an option depending on the type of document you want to scan.
Google Drive works differently. If you have a Google account, no separate registration is required. You can use your Google account for Google Drive. To start scanning files, you have to tap the ‘+’ icon at the bottom of the screen. So you need to scan the document separately, then use it with other apps like Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Folders.
Let’s take a look at the user experience and what they offer beyond document scanning.
2. Scan test
CamScanner will allow you to scan different types of documents like PPTs, ID cards, questionnaires and even QR codes. Under ID Cards, there are separate options for Driver’s License and Passport. But it was the greeting card option that caught my attention.
There are many designs to choose from and all you have to do is write on a piece of paper and scan it with one of the templates.
Yes, I know my handwriting is hard to read and I’m not good at wishing people. So don’t judge!
When you scan a document, it will try to detect edges or you can do it manually. You can rotate it 360 degrees. Once you are satisfied, CamScanner will give you many options to save the scanned file. You can save it as black and white or in grayscale. In my experience, Auto works fine.
In the screenshot above, did you notice the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) icon option inside the magnifying glass? Tap it to get text from the image. When using OCR, you can select a specific area or the entire page depending on your needs. This is useful when you want to search for text inside a scanned image later.
When I scan the business card and use OCR to scan the text, it can detect the name and specify. But it completely ignores the address part. When I use it on a simple document with few or no design elements, it works better. However, for an app with a separate business card scanning option, I was disappointed. Unfortunately, I ran out of other cards for further testing.
You can now translate this text or read it again to correct the error. Both of these features are available after you sign up for a monthly plan. More on that later.
Google Drive does not provide any templates. There is a single type of scan mode available for all document types. Like CamScanner, if Drive Scan fails to detect edges, you can manually adjust it by tapping the square icon.
When you are satisfied with the result, you can continue to save it as a black and white, color or color drawing. To do so, tap the paint icon.
Both CamScanner and Drive Scan can process and scan multiple documents in one go. CamScanner does a better job with its dedicated Batch Scan Mode while in Google Drive, there is a ‘+’ icon to continue scanning, which is visible only on the editing screen. This helps CamScanner batch process faster.
CamScanner also did a better job of detecting edges. In Google Drive, I have to adjust it almost every time I scan a document.
4. Check OCR
When you open a scanned image in CamScanner, there is an option at the bottom to convert the scans to text. When you tap on the OCR option, you’ll be asked to save the results in the credit claim (purchasable) cloud or locally for free. I chose the latter because it doesn’t affect the conversion.
The results are pretty accurate with a few punctuation errors, but still solid. I can read the passage and understand its meaning.
Drive scanning is part of the Google Drive suite of apps that also includes Docs, Sheets, and Slides. As such, things work differently here. Open the scanned file and tap the menu to select Open with. Select Document here and Google will create a new Document with the same name as the scanned text.
Google Drive did a similar job well but with differences. Now I can edit the page in Google Docs and remove any errors in the process. CamScanner allows you to edit a document by exporting it in text format. Additionally, it allows you to annotate them using the InNote app available on the Play Store.
Both CamScanner and Google Drive Scan will help you translate scanned text and convert it into foreign languages. CamScanner and Google Drive have powerful search features that will help you scan text in documents with ease.
5. Pricing and Storage
This is a significant difference between CamScanner and Google Drive. Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage, shared across all Google apps and all the files you’ve stored in Drive. If you need more storage, you can buy 100GB for $1.99 per month and 200GB for $2.99 per month.
CamScanner will cost you $4.99/month for 10GB of storage. Premium features include no ads or watermarks, ability to export OCR results in TXT format, OCR in the cloud (so you can keep everything in sync), unlimited folder creation, splits share password protected files and translate text.
All the features available in the premium CamScanner are already included in Google Drive for free, and the hosting plans are also significantly cheaper. In addition, Google Docs supports rich text formatting while CamScanner converts text to TXT format.
The basic account in CamScanner will give you 200MB of storage. You can earn up to 1.5 GB of storage by engaging in various activities such as writing reviews, inviting friends and sharing on social networking sites.
You can invite up to 10 collaborators in the free account, this number increases to 40 in the premium account. Google has noted in their support forum that up to 100 people can edit a document inside Drive at any time, even in a free account.
CamScanner also offers an enterprise version that starts at $6.99/month. Google has a suite of G Suite apps, but I think it’s not fair to compare the two because G Suite has so many apps.
CamScanner vs Google Drive Scan
Scans made by the CamScanner app are sharper and clearer. This does not mean that Google Drive’s scanned results are inferior. Both are equal when it comes to scanning a document and converting it to text. I feel that CamScanner’s output quality is slightly better than Google Drive’s results.
CamScanner provides different scanning modes for different types of documents. However, I hope you noticed in the previous section about not being able to recognize addresses on business cards. However, CamScanner is still better when it comes to ease of use, such as batch processing. Google Drive is slower but also a much cheaper alternative to the two.
In my ongoing efforts to move the base to the Google ecosystem, I choose Google Drive over CamScanner.
Which one are you using and why?
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
