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The Student Innovators is a group of students passionate about using technology to help learning. They will be trying out apps and web tools alongside their studies and give feedback on the Student Innovator blog. They work together as a team to share their experiences so you know before you download which app is best. You are welcome to read their reviews and leave comments.

Wednesday 21 January 2015

CamScanner Review - By Mustafa Mahmoud

CamScanner review – 

Not what I expected


I walked into this app with great expectations, after all, it was an app that worked as an OCR reader. Yes, an OCR reader. How cool is that??!! I would be able to scan all my notes that I've made over the year and combine into a nice neat package. Unfortunately this wasn't the case.

CamScanner does have an OCR reader, and from its average rating of 4.4 on the Play Store, it probably works really well, however I wasn't able to test it out myself as it was locked behind a pay wall, and a pretty hefty one at that. Without paying, all you get is the ability to take pictures and put them in a PDF file. That’s it. There’s an option to optically recognise the characters, although after selection it just says that you need to pay to use this feature. For some, taking pictures and turning them into PDF files is all they wanted, and for them I would recommend CamScanner. After all, it’s not a bad app, you can save the files to your phone/tablet, share it on social media and it even syncs between devices (it also has cloud storage). But for me, the most exciting feature was the ability to take written work, scan it, and turn it into an editable word document, but in can’t do that.

You may be wondering how much this subscription fee is. Well, its $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year (around £3.30 and £33 respectively), which in my opinion is way too much to pay. The description of the app even touts how it has over 100 million downloads, but I doubt many of them paid the premium at a price that high. I don’t see how this has a market at that price, especially considering how a physical OCR scanner can be bought for around £50 and professional software can be bought for roughly the same (which both undoubtedly work better than a simple app). 

So for those who are looking to turn photos into PDFs, this is the app for you, if on the other hand, you want to use it as and OCR reader, you should look elsewhere as for the price of 1 year service, you could buy a proper OCR reader that will last a lifetime. It may seem like I'm hating on the app a bit too much, but I'm not. The app itself is good looking and relatively easy to navigate, I'm just disappointed with what I thought was going to be an amazing app. 

CamScanner can be downloaded from here:






The website can be accessed from here

By Mustafa Mahmoud

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