Money Savers – Use Your iPhone as an Inexpensive Scanner

Have you ever considered using your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android as a scanner and printer? Now smartphones are even smarter with scan-to-PDF software.

Turboscan by Pixoft (for iDevices) and Google's CamScanner (for Android) are apps that allow smartphones to scan, print and share PDF documents in both black and white and color. I installed Turboscan a few weeks ago and always use it for emailing and to scan short documents requiring my signature. Creating the PDF's is fast, easy, and they look great! And at $1.99 from the iTunes App Store or $4.99 from Google's App Store, these are the cheapest scanners money can buy.

With Turboscan, you simply take a snapshot and convert it to the PDF format, then send the PDF documents to yourself, e-mail as a PDF or a JPEG to others, save to your Camera Roll, or print from an AirPrint-enabled printer (including printers made by Brother, Canon, EPSON, Hewlett Packard and Lexmark).

The best quality scans are achieved with the iPhone 4S's 8 mega-pixel vs. the iPod Touch and the iPad's second-generation. However all of the iDevice cameras accommodate this app.

CamScanner works the same way as Turboscan. You snap a photo and upload to cloud like Dropbox, Google Doc, Box.net, and manage them by tagging or searching.

Click here for Download TurboScan for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. For CamScanner, click here.

About Dyan James

Dyan has been researching, writing, copyediting, and proofreading articles across a variety of industries since 1998. She further developed her interest and talent for covering technology while working with the guys at DCG Technical Solutions, Inc. Whether writing from scratch, copyediting or simply polishing, Dyan has mastered the art of turning rough copy or a plain idea into an eloquently written piece.