Using a Camera as a scanner
Scanners have several large drawbacks when it comes to working being a great solution for personal archival. The image quality on pretty much any scanner now is great but its sort of tedious to take whatever you are working on -> move to the computer room -> put pate one on the scanner -> scan the image and then deal with the rest of the scanning software and then repeat for each item/page. The problem is basically that the process is such a pain it never winds up getting done. Newer scanners and software help with this issue, Neat Receipts and the Fujitsu Snap Scan are both supposed to be great products, but, none can operate away from the computer. None, are able to sit in a corner of my kitchen waiting for the receipt when I get home from the grocery store.
I have looked for quite a while to find a sheet fed scanner that would scan to an SD card rather than a computer. Network scanners are available for businesses and can save files to a network drive or send them via email, but this is sort of a budget killer. So I’m left with one simple affordable solution, a simple digital camera. Digital cameras are easy to use, quick, portable and do a pretty good job of capturing images. Paring your digital camera with an Eye-Fi card, previously discussed, could be a great way to instantly archive all types of data.
The hardware is solid for this application, pretty much any camera will do the job and you can find dozens of 4mp cameras from high end manufacturers on eBay for under $50. The software is sort of there too. Their are two programs that are both designed to work from cell phones that can fill the bill. My favorite is Scanr Scanr allows you to post cellphone or digital camera photos to their service. The system is smart enough to understand the types of images you are providing and make the conversions required to clean up the images and use the data. Scanr will convert a business card to a vcf file so that the contact can easily be added to your address book. I have had little success using the service with my cell phone camera, but, with a full powered digital camera it works quite well. Another service is Qipt, which works primarily from a cell phone. Because the service seems limited to this platform it is of less use for me.
A digital camera solves some of the problems associated with using a computer scanner. I can keep it in a junk drawer in the kitchen, I’m actually working on putting a tripod mount under a cabinet to make taking the pictures more simple, and I don’t have to move all of the items to be scanned into a different room next to my computer, I can fill up a 1 gb card with hundreds of images before having to move them to my pc.
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Check out the eye-if card (http://www.eye.fi/evernote/) [for your camera] integration with Evernote (http://evernote.com/). Take a picture, it goes right to right to your PC and eye-if forwards it on to Evernote where their OCR identifies all the text. If you haven’t tried Evernote you should - the OCR is amazing.