Use your digital camera as an OCR scanner

If you don’t have access to a scanner, did you know you can use your digital camera instead to scan and upload documents for storage and sending by email?

Even better, by using Prizmo you can add Optical Character Recognition (OCR) possibilities to the photo scans, meaning you can scan and search text in Spotlight just like a normal OCR scanned document. Using Prizmo is very easy. Simply take a picture of your document, import it into Prizmo, select the part of the photograph you want to OCR, adjust brightness, contrast, height and width etc., and then drag and drop it onto your desktop.

When you select the text you want to OCR, you have to mark four corner points around the text. This can be a little awkward at first, especially if you mark the wrong points and then have to drag it into shape again. Once you’ve done this however, click ‘OCR text’ and it will automatically save the text in JPG format to your hard drive. The problem I found is that Prizmo simply created a magnified version of the text that I wasn’t able to text search. It didn’t show up in Spotlight either, so I’m not sure how effective the OCR function is – perhaps it depends on the quality of the original scan.

Overall however, Prizmo does produce more convincing scans. The OCR function may be a bit hit and miss, though.

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