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DBXCommunity
Community Manager
Community ManagerWhatâs new: Scanner App
Thereâs nothing worse than forgetting an idea, or losing an important piece of paper. The one thing we never lose, and usually donât forget is our phone - so now with the Dropbox Scanner App, you can...
How is this different from the scanning function already built into the Dropbox app?
- Amy
Dropbox Scan is a standalone app for power scanners or those looking for a simple scanning solution on mobile. The Dropbox mobile app is a comprehensive cloud storage app that offers numerous features within it including document scanning.
- dropbox Scan is not stand-alone. after starting, you eventually get to a screen with a single button: start the dropbox app. when you do that, you can then choose âscan a documentâ from within the dropbox app (not in the Scan app now). after youâve scanned your first document, a NEW button appears in Scan to capture the second document, and from then on you are not forced to use the Dropbox app, even if you deleted all the documents. Iâm guessing itâs done like this because Scan has no way to choose the Dropbox youâre going to put your scan into, IOW, it is NOT stand-alone FOR AUTHENTICATION. This is a design disaster; users will repeat the first sequence they learn, and so they will never learn to start the Scan app first.
For basic document scanning, I'm not seeing much of a difference in capabilities and scanning experience between using the Scan app and the main Dropbox app. The Scan app does avoid an extra click or two by providing a default location and quality setting.
I see a difference in scan quality and file size. Scan app files are more than twice as big (1.5MB vs. 525KB) at highest quality. Reducing quality on either platform to balanced/medium reduces file size by about a third (1MB or 424K, respectively). I don't understand why the files are so huge - I produce a file a tenth of the size (116K for the same doc) from my Epson desktop scanner. The Scan app did a better job ignoring highligher marks on the page - unless you wanted to see these on the PDFs as well - the highlights are completely gone on the scan. But it also did a worse job preserving lighter color text on the page - these indicate to me that it is using a lower threshold for discerning white vs. black.
Good to have options, I suppose. But based on my quick and dirty comparison here, I might just stick with the main Dropbox app for now. It avoids the need for yet another app, produces smaller files, and offers some additional control (e.g., manually selecting document corners); it's even already there for Android.
It might make sense for Dropbox to instead provide a widget to provide a direct path to the main app's scanning function, that provides a more streamlined capture experience. Smaller (much smaller) file sizes and a darkness/threshold control wouldn't hurt either. Oh, and OCR to embed searchable text.
Great analysis Seraphin. There is a control for contrast in Scan but it's not active for the documents I've snapped so far. Maybe it's dependent on using the monochrome image (black and white)? Don't know.
I think it's hard to compare file sizes between devices because the color gamut (number of colors captured) varies so significantly. If you capture fewer colors, the file size will, of course, be smaller since it's representing less information. I think what's important, instead of file size, might be how crisp and readable you find the text, especially in a print, which influences how accurate/fast the OCR process will be.
I don't see why having a stand-alone app matters, anyway... Do you?
