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Forum Discussion
DBXCommunity
5 years agoCommunity Manager
What’s new: Scanner App
There’s nothing worse than forgetting an idea, or losing an important piece of paper. The one thing we never lose, and usually don’t forget is our phone - so now with the Dropbox Scanner App, you can save, organize, and share important documents right from your phone. Dropbox Scan is a standalone app that lets you quickly transform all your physical documents into high-quality PDFs. It’s everything you love about doc scanner in the Dropbox app—but even faster and easier to use. The app is available to iOS users in English-speaking markets, and you can sign into Dropbox with your corp email or a Basic, Plus, or Professional account. Whatever the situation, whether it’s a piece of paper, a receipt or even a whiteboard of notes, you can conveniently save high quality scans to Dropbox.
- Receipts - Take the pain out of your next expense report, and save receipts as you go.
- Whiteboard drawings - Never feel rushed in a meeting or presentation again. Just use the doc scanner, and an image of the whiteboard will be uploaded as a PDF or PNG to Dropbox.
- Contracts, bills, and invoices - Now your filing cabinet can be digital, and take up a lot less space. And of course, you can share it with others who need access.
- Photos - We’ve all taken a photo of a photo, but now you can scan them and keep them safe, with the same phone - just better results.
- Business cards - Never lose an important connection! Easily upload business cards from meetings, conferences and trade shows—right from your mobile device.
- Magazine clippings - Instead of ripping out a piece of a magazine or newspaper scrap you will inevitably lose, just scan the page or excerpt into Dropbox using the document scanner.
- Personal cards and notes - Scan those thoughtful personal notes into Dropbox for keepsakes without the clutter.
- Handouts - Scan in materials from classes or seminars for easy reference— they’re a lot less likely to get crumpled or torn in a digital setting!
- Napkin sketches - Never lose your next big idea again.
There’s a Smart crop feature, Smart folder suggestions based on where you've saved recent scans, and you can even edit the scan for clarity!
You can probably tell we’re a little excited about this one! Which of these uses are you excited about?
- KjohnsNew member | Level 2Convenient, but poor quality scan. Check out CamScanner: http://cc.co/16WuWg
- Gregg T.Helpful | Level 6it seems that camScanner charges to scan a multi-page PDF. true?
- Andrek70New member | Level 2
The most phones & PC'S out there not ios why start with that?
- Gregg T.Helpful | Level 6I’ve developed software for all platforms but MacOSX, and I can tell you that Windows app’s are horrible to write since the platform is so fractured. Not only are there multiple versions of Windows (7, 8, 10), but there are 7 flavors of Win 10, and a developer never knows which .NET version is supported on each flavor. Some users can’t upgrade .NET, or it can require multiple reboots to install it. Sometimes installing a .NET version will cause other app’s to fail, and some .NET installs can not be uninstalled, so you’ve just bricked an app, angering users.
The resources required to develop Windows app’s used to be simple such that a single developer could handle it; now it requires a team to write and test an app that works for 90% of deployments, and that’s never going to cover hardware you don’t have, or drivers you can’t get.
- SeraphinHelpful | Level 5
How is this different from the scanning function already built into the Dropbox app?
- AmyCommunity Manager
Dropbox Scan is a standalone app for power scanners or those looking for a simple scanning solution on mobile. The Dropbox mobile app is a comprehensive cloud storage app that offers numerous features within it including document scanning.
- SeraphinHelpful | Level 5
For basic document scanning, I'm not seeing much of a difference in capabilities and scanning experience between using the Scan app and the main Dropbox app. The Scan app does avoid an extra click or two by providing a default location and quality setting.
I see a difference in scan quality and file size. Scan app files are more than twice as big (1.5MB vs. 525KB) at highest quality. Reducing quality on either platform to balanced/medium reduces file size by about a third (1MB or 424K, respectively). I don't understand why the files are so huge - I produce a file a tenth of the size (116K for the same doc) from my Epson desktop scanner. The Scan app did a better job ignoring highligher marks on the page - unless you wanted to see these on the PDFs as well - the highlights are completely gone on the scan. But it also did a worse job preserving lighter color text on the page - these indicate to me that it is using a lower threshold for discerning white vs. black.
Good to have options, I suppose. But based on my quick and dirty comparison here, I might just stick with the main Dropbox app for now. It avoids the need for yet another app, produces smaller files, and offers some additional control (e.g., manually selecting document corners); it's even already there for Android.
It might make sense for Dropbox to instead provide a widget to provide a direct path to the main app's scanning function, that provides a more streamlined capture experience. Smaller (much smaller) file sizes and a darkness/threshold control wouldn't hurt either. Oh, and OCR to embed searchable text.
- AlistairDExplorer | Level 3
Really pleased that part of my annual Dropbox fee is being spent on developing iOS apps that my Android handset can't use.
- Gregg T.Helpful | Level 6Android camera-based app’s are far more expensive to develop than iOS apps since there are 100’s of combinations of camera hardware and brands to test in the Android world. iOS has 3, and targeting only 2 of them gets your app running on 80% of the deployed hardware.
Plus, Dropbox is interested in secure environments, and indeed is required to ONLY use secured platforms for some of their contracts (but not for their consumer versions); Android, OTOH, is virus-ridden. iOS DOES have a few viruses but Apple has far more robust mitigation efforts than Google & the Android companies have.
- Eric DelisleExplorer | Level 3
App is interesting, works nicely on a Android 10, but image auto acquirying system is to nervous!, app should let us take the picture without trying to do by itself, at least have the option to switch off that facility or make it more slow.
Once you take your shoot, we should be able to magnify image ( on the picture visualization screen), so we can approve the picture quality before going on.
The screen for adjusting the picture is very good. It shows the entire picture, even if the nervous sistem acquired only part of it, we can adjust correctly to the edges with the magnifying sistem.
Saving is simple and efficient.
- Mary Rose LNew member | Level 2
I am interesting in the Photo scanner and Magazine/clippings scanner. Please let me know what this involves by return email. Thank you
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