The flatbed scanner is a type of scanner used for scanning photos, documents, sheets of paper, books, or any other scanning object. This scanner comes with a flat, glass board to hold the scanning object. Scan hed is moved under the glass sheet. One specialty of the flatbed scanners is that they come with sheet feeders means they can scan multiple sheets at one time rather than one sheet at one time. It works best for painters, photographers, and persons who require to change a large number of images to digital form. Flatbed provides superior quality performance for this purpose.
Usually, many good quality scanners are available in the market in various ranges. But you will be surprised to know that you can use your smartphone camera as a flatbed scanner too i.e .it can serve the purpose of both a camera and a scanner. Let’s see how we can do it.
iPhone or Android devices are also good for scanning/ digitalizing old photos, documents, receipts, notes, etc. Let’s start with iPhone users.
Use iPhone to digitalize text
You can use your iPhone camera for this purpose
Open the note app and create a new note, tap the camera icon, and select scan text. Poise your phone over the text you want to capture, and words will pop up in the notes app, save the document, and tap done.
For Andriod, users open the google drive and Tap on the bottom right add button. tap the scan icon, take a photo of the document to be scanned, and crop it. If the document is of more than one page again Tap on the add button (+) to scan more documents. Now checkmark to upload documents to google drive. To save it Tap on the done tab.
How to use iPhone apps to serve the purpose of a scanner
- Open the Notes app and make a new note, Tap on the camera button on the bottom of the screen and select scan documents, it can be a photo too.
- In Auto Mode, the document will be automatically scanned but in case you need to capture the document manually for scanning then you can use shutter buttons for this purpose.
- Finally, drag the corners to fit the scan and Tap on keep scan.
- In the case of a photo, there will be another editing option available at the bottom corner of your iPhone. Complete the scan and save the document/ photo.
- If we need to sign a scanned document, open the document to be signed, and Tap on the Share button on the top right corner of the screen. This button is like a square with an arrow pointing.
- Use your fingertips to sign on the document, and use your finger to zoom in and out the form.
- Different pointer, pen, and marker options are available on the bottom corner of the screen. You can use them as per your requirement.
- Once you finish signing your document tap on done. Hence we see that all these ways to use an iPhone or Android to scan documents are not easy but also convenient when we are away from our computers/ devices. Smarter software and better camera sensors help to make the quality even better too.