I apologise to old camera-phone hands who've been down this road before - this will seem a bit obvious, but, for the newcomers around here and to anyone who might not have thought this laterally before, consider that your auto-focus camera in your Symbian smartphone is good enough to replace a Scanner for occasional use. Using an N82 and 5800 as examples, I demonstrate what to do.
Read on in the full article.
When you upload to a PC, you'll find the quality will be good enough for OCR, so you can convert if from an image to a Word or PDF document.
Apology accepted :-P
Quipit?
Steve, a very nice article indeed! I was pondering this a while ago actually b/c I find this a really great use for an autofocus phone. Actually I got an E71 over a Blackberry b/c the BB lacked the autofocus camera that I require for precisely this purpose!
I used your article as an inspiration for a follow-up post in my blog that elaborates on a few of your thoughts and adds some ideas that I have found during my implementation of that concept.
You can find it at http://w0nk0.posterous.com/how-to-use-your-autofocus-mobile-cam-as-a-sca
Thanks for a nice article that I will certainly refer other people to in the future!
W0nk0
Regarding the photo processing section, a decent free photo application for Windows is Irfanview:
It's not the most advanced photo editor out there, but it's free, fast and small. I've used it for years and it does everything I want from a photo editor.
Combine the use of your camera scanner with Evernote
Evernote will perform the OCR and you will be able to search your scanned documents
You can Upload your notes or photos by email.
Try it
Marcel
Good article Steve. I have been using the same technique for while. I use it in work meetings, taking a photo of the white board at the end of the session, sometimes not bbothering to circulate meeting minutes just emailing the jpeg! Also use my phone to take pictures of articles from newspapers that I want to read later but where I don't want to lug the newspaper around with me.
I've used ScanR and Qipit for the same tasks and they're quite good. Evernote is OK for OCR, but it doesn't export 'scanned' documents like the others.
combine the pic of the white board with the recording you make of the meeting. Job done, an hours snooze 😮)
I use my e90 to take pictures of posters I come across that I think people I know will like or want to know about. combined with more and more people using email on their phone instead of just relying on MMS means its now dead easy to share info quickly and simply.
I have used the camera for Roadmaps or maps when I went out hiking. This is good enough for people without a dataplan, or when you are in other than your home-country or network.
And I used it to remember the parking slot in a huge airport parking, focussing on the number of the slot.
I've done the whiteboard thang after a particularly painfully planning meeting.
Another use is taking pics of bus timetables, if you can't find 'em on the web...
Or use The Gimp (gimp.org), open source, available for Windows and Linux.
Steve, the screenshot above is from a 5800? How do I get a fullscreen 16:9 preview? The buttons on my 5800 in photo capture mode are black, and the preview is 4:3.
I found that this method works well with your old photos too. 😊
neat. tried it, it is a good idea, except that wrinckles on the paper appear too.
Tip: use the timer to make a scan without the need to push the shutter button shaking the camera.
Great for business cards- any takers for software to OCR the result in the phone and save the contents as contacts?
I use this to take down lab results, opening hours, etc. Last time I used it was when I was in a shop and saw a cool jacket; I took a photo of the tag, then looked up the serial number online.