Evan Carmichael compares phone cameras and ScanSnap scanners for capturing receipts in Evernote. Phone photos are five times larger in file size, while scanners automatically straighten documents and improve OCR accuracy. Phones are faster and more convenient, but scanners produce cleaner results that stores accept for returns.
Chapters
Welcome to another edition of Technology Tuesday, and today I'm answering a question from Troy, one of my YouTube viewers—
love you guys— who's asking about Evernote.
So Troy's question was, "Nice video, couple of questions. Does the photo taken from the phone take up more space than a scanned PDF? Do you ever take photos of 8.5x11 invoices, receipts, and so on, or are those better scanned?" This is a great question, and when you're using Evernote, you can either get a ScanSnap or scanner that can connect to Evernote, or you can take pictures with your phone.
And I used to do everything scanning, and now I use the phone mostly for convenience.
So in terms of the sizing, to answer your question, I found that by keeping approximately the same settings so they get the same quality of image, if you take a picture with your phone, it's going to be 5 times bigger than if you scan it through a ScanSnap, which is what I use as my scanner. So it does take up a lot more space, about 5 times bigger. The second thing to think about is if you use a scanner with my ScanSnap, it will straighten the paper as it goes through.
So if you have any creases or folds or bends in your receipt, maybe you folded it in your wallet or, you know, your agreement was crumpled at the side, the scanner will flatten it out as it goes through the scanning process. Where with a phone, you have to stomp it out and make it flat yourself. So if you have a lot of folded papers, you want to use a scanner. And the other thing I found, that when you scan documents in, it's easier to take it back to stores. So if you are going to return something, right, you bought something at IKEA, you want to take it back, they're much more willing to accept a scanned version than a picture of a receipt for whatever reason. And I guess one last thing, when you're taking a picture with your phone, you have to make sure that it's focused. So some of the early ones that I took, I would just take a picture and then throw away the receipt and then realize that when I looked at it on my computer, it was out of focus. and it couldn't pick up the text recognition, so it made it a lot harder. So there's a lot of reasons why to use the ScanSnap scanner instead of taking a phone.
Having said that, I still do everything on the phone. And the main reason is convenience.
It's just a lot faster than putting things through the scanner. So I'll lay out all the receipts on the floor or on the table or whatever it is and just go, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, and save it. And they're all there. So, Yes, you have to make sure they're flat. Yes, you have to make sure, you know, the camera's in focus. Yes, it's going to be bigger on your computer than scanning it in, but I find that it saves you some time.
So hopefully that helps. Great question. For those of you watching, you like the video, you can subscribe to the channel. You can support me by clicking on the link in the description and leave a comment. You have a question, whatever note, you have a comment about this video, leave it below and I love seeing those comments. So thank you.
