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DBXCommunity
Community Manager
Community ManagerWhat’s new: Scanner App
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- Not excited about any, as I have an Android device and it is only available for ios. Hate when companies show preference to one operating platform especially when I pay for the premium service. It also looks like Dropbox makes no replies to it's users in here. 🙁 Seeing lots of posts that are 2 weeks old with no comments from Dropbox.
- try the Office Lens app, from Microsoft. Although it has a flaw when converting a image taken with a rotated camera to a PDF, it does everything that this Scan app does, but saves to OneDrive. It's a bit tedious to have to copy documents from OneDrive to dropbox, but the scan quality is generally excellent.
- 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 “scan a document” from within the dropbox app (not in the Scan app now). after you’ve 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. I’m guessing it’s done like this because Scan has no way to choose the Dropbox you’re 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.
- After I’ve scanned a multi-page PDF and saved it, how do I add a new page to it via Scan?
It always wants to create a new PDF, which would be fine if there was some way to combine the pages of the 2 documents together in Scan. This means I have to get the Scan exactly right before saving it, but in many cases I don’t know if it’s going to be right until I display the PDF in context (and find it there’s glare or I cropped it wrong) or try to print the PDF (and find out the scan doesn’t fit on the page) - it seems that camScanner charges to scan a multi-page PDF. true?
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.
