scanR is a nice service that lets you do more with your camera phone or digital camera. For example, you can capture whiteboard content without copying them down by hand, you can upload business cards to contact management applications without keying them in manually — and you can do all this by using your camera phone or digital camera, without requiring a scanner. You can read my previous how-to articles on this subject here and here.
How well scanR does these jobs would obviously depend upon the quality of the camera used. Since scanR states that most digital cameras deliver good enough quality, the quality question is only relevant for camera phones. So, from now on, whenever I talk of quality, it will pertain to a camera phone’s quality.
As most of us know, camera phones come with a wide range of resolutions and quality. While resolution of a camera phone is a basic specification that can be obtained from its brochure, quality is a more elusive concept. One camera phone with lower resolution as per its specifications might actually deliver better quality as compared to another having higher resolution. Often, the only way to figure out a camera phone’s quality is to actually try it out.
Since scanR’s output quality ultimately depends upon the camera phone’s quality (rather than resolution), I was wondering if scanR offers any advice to its users on how to find out the quality. When I recently checked scanR, I was happy to find not just advice, but an end-to-end process to check your camera phone’s quality. This is available on a website called CheckMyCameraPhone.com. This website carries a logo of scanR and is linked from scanR’s website, so it is presumably a scanR affiliate. Here are the steps to test a phone’s quality:
Not finding my Nokia model (6230) listed on the results page, I used the website to check out its quality as a test case.
You can see the test resolution chart here.
This was the image I got back from scanR.
In the original of this image, I could read text on line number 18 but nothing lower than that was legible, so I entered 18 on the CheckMyCameraPhone.com website.
This finished the process — quite smooth, I must say — of checking my camera phone’s quality at CheckMyCameraPhone.com.
I encourage readers to try this out, it’s quite easy and good fun!