A Portable Travel Scanner: Your Camera Phone

Want to capture a whiteboard, business card, contract, brochure (or even a wine list) and send it back to the team at home as a PDF (with extractable text?) Try the online photo to PDF service ScanR.

With ScanR, you e-mail your picture to the service and they send you back a PDF version of your picture. They straighten, tonally adjust, sharpen, and run OCR (optical character recognition) on the file.

Admittedly, the OCR is limited and white board images can’t easily be converted into text, but with a good source image the service can make a vCard accessible by a contact application from a good picture of a business card.

The better your phone can capture images, the better off you are. You can test your camera here. The best cameras tested so far are:

1. Sony Ericsson K790a/K800i
2. Nokia N73
3. Samsung A990
4. Sony Ericsson K750i/W800i/W810i