REASONS TO BUY
Now available for free
High quality scans
Great text recognition
REASONS TO AVOID
Slow and laborious for multi-page documents
Scanner Pro App Review
A perfect free option for those that occasionally scan shorter documents and receipts
Though we love the Scanner Pro App, taking photos of every page gets tiresome if you're scanning a long document.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
RELATED: Best Scanners of 2024
Our Verdict
The Scanner Pro App is a perfect alternative for those who don't want to invest a lot of space and cash into building a home office. It is ideal for scanning a few 1-10 page documents per month or a handful of important receipts that you want to digitize and preserve for tax time. Now free to download, it provides a handy app on your phone and, with just a little bit of effort, can produce very high-quality PDFs with searchable text. Plus, it can easily scan pages from a book, something most dedicated document scanners can't do. Sure, using your phone to take a picture of each page can be quite a drag if you have to scan lots of pages, but if your scanning needs are less than that, or you don't mind saving some money through a little extra manual labor, the Scanner Pro App is perfect.
Editor's Note: The Scanner Pro App review was updated on March 20, 2022, with more tips on which products we like best and details to help you better compare products.
Compare to Similar Products
 This Product Scanner Pro App | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awards |  Best Overall Scanner |  Best Portable Scanner |  Best Bang for the Buck | ||
| Price | $0.00 List | $329 List $229.00 at Amazon | $180 List $149.99 at Amazon | $120 List $99.00 at Amazon | $120 List Check Price at Amazon |
Overall Score  |
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| Star Rating | |||||
| Bottom Line | You can give it a try without any risk, and packs a lot of performance into a phone app, but isn't great for longer documents | We love this scanner for its speed, user-friendliness, and also it's all-around performance at a fair price | Great performance from a portable scanner that isn't to bad on the wallet | Great performance for infrequent tasks, but not great for large tasks that require auto feeding and higher speeds | While not the fastest, it excels in every aspect at a relatively low price |
| Rating Categories | Scanner Pro App | Canon ImageFORMULA R40 | Epson WorkForce ES-60W | Epson Perfection V3... | Brother DS-640 |
| Scanning Performance (35%) | |||||
| Speed (30%) | |||||
| Ease of Use (20%) | |||||
| Software (15%) | |||||
| Specs | Scanner Pro App | Canon ImageFORMULA R40 | Epson WorkForce ES-60W | Epson Perfection V3... | Brother DS-640 |
| Paper Sizes | Any size | Max: 8.5" x 14" Min: 2" x 2.1" |
Max: 8.5" x 72" | 8.5" x 11.7" | Max: 8.5" x 32" |
| Resolution | N/A | 600 dpi | 1200 dpi | 4800 dpi | 600 x 600 dpi |
| Simplex/Duplex | Simplex | Duplex | Simplex | Simplex | Simplex |
| Automatic Document Feeder | No | 60-page | No | No | No |
| Measured Pages Per Minute | 3.0 | 16.7 | 7.5 | 3.8 | 4.0 |
| Weight | N/A | 6.2 lb | 0.7 lb | 3.1 lb | 1.0 lb |
Show full specification detailsHide full specification details
Our Analysis and Test Results
The Scanner Pro App performed surprisingly well in our testing, producing high-quality scans, offering very accurate character recognition, and doing it all with an intuitive interface. However, being purely phone-based, scanning longer documents can be slow and laborious. In the following sections, we dive into how it performed in each one of our tests.
Performance Comparison
Though we love the Scanner Pro App, taking photos of every page gets tiresome if you're scanning a long document.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Scanning Performance
The Scanner Pro App was just behind other top scorers and dedicated scanning devices in our scan quality testing. It excelled at making PDFs out of printed text and handwritten documents. Because the app uses the generally high-quality cameras found on iPhones, these documents came out looking nearly identical to the originals. It also avoided the smudge problems that many of the traditional scanners encountered when digitizing receipts, though the glossy background did create some odd blue pixelation in some cases. Overall, we still preferred the receipt scans produced by the Scanner Pro App to almost all of the traditional scanners we tested.
The Pro App renders near perfect text, whether printed or handwritten.
The Scanner Pro also did quite well when scanning full-color documents. The software that automatically crops the photo down to the edges distorts the colors slightly, but overall it performs almost as well as higher-end scanners that we tested. These perks make the Scanner Pro the clear choice for small scanning jobs but not the best choice for bigger scanning jobs or long documents.
The Pro App sometimes adds some weird blue pixelation to receipts, but otherwise is near perfect.
Speed
Speed is the one area where the Scanner Pro App falters a bit. It took us a little over three minutes to scan a 10-page, double-sided document with this app. That worked out to about three pages per minute. It isn't the slowest scanner in our review, but this certainly isn't fast, and it is a hands-on process the entire time as you have to position the paper, take a photo, and make sure the app crops it well before moving onto the next page.
Since it captures documents using an actual camera, the Pro App produced the best color scans of all the models we tested.
Software
The Scanner Pro App has one of the best software packages we tested, putting it near the top of the leaderboard. The app is easy to purchase and install from the app store, and it uses a file management system that is native to your iPhone, making it easy to email, text, or save scans anywhere you'd like. Most impressively, its optical character recognition was one of the best of the bunch. We searched and found nearly every word in all of the documents we scanned, with only a few missed words here and there.
User Friendliness
The Scanner Pro App shared one of the top scores in our user friendliness testing. It earned this score mainly because it is effortless to install on your iPhone. There are no scanner-computer connections to worry about, so you can be scanning within seconds of deciding to download the app. The interface also works beautifully. As long as whatever you're scanning is placed on a monochromatic background, the app generally crops your photos perfectly to create an edgeless PDF. Occasionally, you may have to fine-tune the cropping a bit, but usually, it is spot on. It's also easy to create multi-page PDFs from multiple photos. The only reason it didn't earn a perfect score is that taking a physical picture of each page you want to scan is a bit more labor-intensive than simply loading a page into a traditional scanner.
The process of taking photos of every page does make scanning longer documents time consuming.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Should You Buy the Scanner Pro App?
The Scanner Pro App is an incredible value and is available as a free download. Because of this, you can take a shot and see how it works out, and even if you eventually decide you need to upgrade to a traditional document scanner, you're not out any dough. There is virtually no risk in getting this app, and we recommend it to anyone who isn't sure if their scanning needs merit getting an expensive office machine.
What Other Scanners Should You Consider?
The Scanner Pro App is the perfect choice for people who scan infrequently and those who want to scan receipts on the go. But if you use a scanner for work or have stacks of old photos you would like to digitize, you may find a traditional scanner to be more beneficial in your workspace. The Fujitsu Fi-8170 is the most efficient machine we tested and can scan document after document without letting you down; however, this performance comes at a premium cost. If your scanning needs are more photo-oriented, the Epson Perfection V39 II is a small, affordable, yet highly functional model.
—
Max Mutter
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