If you have ever sat in a meeting or a lecture where the presenter was churning out notes onto a whiteboard, you have undoubtedly thought that there must be better way to get the notes on the board into your computer without scribbling furiously to get every word down. ScanR (
www.scanr.com) provides, for the time being, a free service that does just that.
ScanR allows users to take photos of whiteboards, business cards and letter size documents and then converts the information into a PDF (Portable Document Format) file.
ScanR boasts ease of use by asserting on its website: 1.) Take a picture 2.)Send it to ScanR 3.) Check your email. As if the technology fairies have waived their wand and magically imported all of your contacts into your palm pilot. It is just not that simple. My experience with ScanR was muddy and frustrating and by the end of it, I had scanned nothing.
Once you log onto
www.scanr.com and register by putting your name, email and phone number into their registration fields, an automatically generated email is sent to your account with simple instructions:
- To scan something, just take photos and send them to doc@scanR.com for documents, wb@scanR.com for whiteboards, or bc@scanR.com for business cards. You can send photos from your camera phone or computer.
- Any photos you send to scanR will be processed and saved online at www.scanR.com. Just click on My Scans to search, download or share your scans.
- Using scanR for Mobile, you can send scans from selected camera phones with one click. Learn more at http://www.scanr.com/download
I tried using all three of the services with my camera phone, as I tend not to carry around my digital camera. All three of my pictures were rejected with a text saying that my photo was too small. Already, I had wasted my time photographing, texting, and registering. In addition…ScanR’s home page is not user friendly, the phone restrictions were not discussed until my photos were rejected and I consulted the help page.
It was there that I found out, that there is a “checkmycameraphone†link, where you can see if your phone has high resolution, appropriate lens quality and compression software-three things that are needed to make the service work that they did not tell you about on the home page. By the time my experience with scanR was over, I could have written my notes and re-typed them into my computer.
In conclusion, while this service may be good for users with high resolution camera phones or people that frequently take their digital cameras to meetings…a regular phone isn’t going to get you there.
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Comments
... and what about
... and what about www.COMOMBO.com ?!
They deliver the same results but do the image processing on the mobile phone. This compresses the file size by 90%, which saves lots of money and time during data transfer, and you can check the image qulaity before you send it out.
No more calls like: ... I can not read this ...
Snapter works (sometimes)
Snapter works (sometimes) only from your computer. Qipit and scanr work from anywhere. Big difference. Mobile copy on the go. qipit is definitvely worth trying: www.qipit.com. My 2 cents. --JK
I think you should try
I think you should try Snapter.
http://www.atiz.com/
In my opinion, it's a better product.
Why wasting a lot of time sending and receiving emails of your documents when you can get all those pages processing done immediately
You might want simply to give
You might want simply to give qipit a try... They have a quite different user interface and approach even if at the end they produce crisp clear images of whiteboards
http://www.qipit.com/SEC001MP001/
-- Al
Hi, this is Chris from
Hi, this is Chris from scanR.
Thank you for taking the time to review scanR. I'm sorry your experience was difficult. scanR requires a 1 megapixel or better camera phone and it could have been more clearly stated up front. We are testing different home page designs and will consider how make this more clear. One of the challenges is that people simply don't know their camera's quality, so they often just try scanR to find out. You can also go to http://checkmycameraphone.com where users submit ratings on their cameras.
If you'd like help, please contact me or help@scanR.com.
This idea that ScanR is
This idea that ScanR is trying to generate, is a good one - however, they need to iron out the rough patches that consumers have to deal with before it would be worth using. I could see this being beneficial in meetings/lectures that have diagrams as their main topic (i.e. math classes, architecture meetings, etc).
I could see this being
I could see this being extremely helpful for brainstorming meetings. We tend to use the whiteboard extensively in those, and then someone is left with the task of writing down the notes and translating them into a format compatible with Word.
If I come into work and see
If I come into work and see the overhead setup, I know I'm in for a long stretch of boring. Typically I find that if I don't take notes, mess with my Treo, maybe text another fellow bored worker across the table, I've missed little and found 80% of the info completely useless. Presentations are nice, and these tools help make it more palatable, but for the most part, I find I never refer back to the notes. Someone needs to invent something that distills the bulls**t down to some basic useful facts.