[ghshephard]

I don't think I've ever used a scanner since the camera became half decent on the iPhone. Even when I have 40 pages of text to scan, it's more straightforward to just snap it from my desk than to walk the 50' or so to the $8000 scanning/printer we have in the office. And, when I'm in the field - well, you get the idea.

I guess if I was scanning hundreds of pages, It would probably be worthwhile to use a desktop scanner, but for 40 pages or less - smart phone camera wins every time.

[Steuard]

Everyone has their own priorities and processes. For me, being able to throw half a dozen pages into a document feeder and get a small, good-quality PDF in my email a minute later is a big step up from the effort I used to put into assembling image files into multi-page online resources for my students.

What do you do to minimize irritants like uneven margins and wonky viewing angles? (Every time I've photographed printed pages, I've wound up feeling stuck with a bunch of work to make the output actually look reasonable.)

[Stratoscope]

> What do you do to minimize irritants like uneven margins and wonky viewing angles?

My favorite solution: CamScanner. It's one of the apps I use most on my Android phone, and is available on iOS too. There's a free version and a Pro version for $5. I don't know the differences offhand, but I bought the Pro version without a second thought after trying the free one.

It autodetects the edges of your document and crops and deskews it, and then enhances the color/brightness/contrast for readability. It will do this automatically or you can adjust the cropping and enhancement manually.

For more intensive cleaning up of scans (either from a camera or a scanner), there's a wonderful open source app called Scan Tailor:

http://scantailor.org/

A few months ago I scanned an old manual for the SIMPL (Systems IMPLementation) language we developed and used at Tymshare in the '70s. It was a photocopy of an original manual with most of the pages skewed a bit one way or the other, and dark speckles all over the place.

I cut off the binding (lucky for me it was Velobind so I just cut off the back strip with a knife and had it re-bound at Kinko's when done) and ran the pages through my Brother MFC-9070cdw at 600 dpi. Scan Tailor took the page images and deskewed them, removed the speckles and generally cleaned things up. There were one or two pages where I made some manual adjustments - and also I turned off the feature where it zooms the page to fit just the text on it since I wanted the text to be the same size on all pages. Other than that I just let it do its thing and the result was pretty nice - the PDF looks much better than the original manual!

[aaronbrethorst]

I bought a scanner earlier this year, but I use it exclusively for scanning film negatives. (and positives on occasion; slide film is gorgeous!)

I also bought a dedicated semi-pro photo printer last year. A full load of ink costs me $120 for 8 itty bitty tanks.