You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
DBXCommunity
Community Manager
Community ManagerWhat’s new: Scanner App
There’s nothing worse than forgetting an idea, or losing an important piece of paper. The one thing we never lose, and usually don’t forget is our phone - so now with the Dropbox Scanner App, you can...
How is this different from the scanning function already built into the Dropbox app?
AmyCommunity Manager
Community ManagerDropbox Scan is a standalone app for power scanners or those looking for a simple scanning solution on mobile. The Dropbox mobile app is a comprehensive cloud storage app that offers numerous features within it including document scanning.
For basic document scanning, I'm not seeing much of a difference in capabilities and scanning experience between using the Scan app and the main Dropbox app. The Scan app does avoid an extra click or two by providing a default location and quality setting.
I see a difference in scan quality and file size. Scan app files are more than twice as big (1.5MB vs. 525KB) at highest quality. Reducing quality on either platform to balanced/medium reduces file size by about a third (1MB or 424K, respectively). I don't understand why the files are so huge - I produce a file a tenth of the size (116K for the same doc) from my Epson desktop scanner. The Scan app did a better job ignoring highligher marks on the page - unless you wanted to see these on the PDFs as well - the highlights are completely gone on the scan. But it also did a worse job preserving lighter color text on the page - these indicate to me that it is using a lower threshold for discerning white vs. black.
Good to have options, I suppose. But based on my quick and dirty comparison here, I might just stick with the main Dropbox app for now. It avoids the need for yet another app, produces smaller files, and offers some additional control (e.g., manually selecting document corners); it's even already there for Android.
It might make sense for Dropbox to instead provide a widget to provide a direct path to the main app's scanning function, that provides a more streamlined capture experience. Smaller (much smaller) file sizes and a darkness/threshold control wouldn't hurt either. Oh, and OCR to embed searchable text.
Great analysis Seraphin. There is a control for contrast in Scan but it's not active for the documents I've snapped so far. Maybe it's dependent on using the monochrome image (black and white)? Don't know.
I think it's hard to compare file sizes between devices because the color gamut (number of colors captured) varies so significantly. If you capture fewer colors, the file size will, of course, be smaller since it's representing less information. I think what's important, instead of file size, might be how crisp and readable you find the text, especially in a print, which influences how accurate/fast the OCR process will be.
I don't see why having a stand-alone app matters, anyway... Do you?
Gregg, I'll have to look for that contrast control. My file size comparisons were for similar format and quality (as in "readable 8-pt text" in b&w). There isn't any control over capture resolution, so that can't really count as a factor. From a use case perspective, these were different file sizes for effectively the same output. Now, if they provided some control over capture resolution, we could have a meaningful discussion of what settings (in addition to the ones already provided) deliver the best balance of usable output vs. file size.
But Dropbox isn't alone with file size inflation for PDF docs. I compared output once between Adobe Acrobat, Camscanner, Microsoft Lens, and maybe one other app to see which one worked best for me. They were all bloated to an extent. I opted for Dropbox primarily because I like working in the Dropbox cloud with its straighforward file organization and sharing schemes.
To be clear, I really like the Dropbox (main app) scanning function. It has some room for improvement, but it is still one of the better mobile PDF capture options available. I'm not so sure that Dropbox Scan brings ME any benefit, besides saving a few clicks, and perhaps providing a slightly different contrast result that might be favorable in certain situations, but to others, these differences might very well be killer features.
EDIT: I ran a few more test scans. Dropbox Scan's lowest quality setting seems similar to the main app's highest quality setting. You get a lot more dithering at the lower quality settings with the main Dropbox app. So... their quality settings are not really equivalent. It's possible that Scan captures at a higher resolution to start with; I would have to extract images and compare the bitmaps to really know. Also, I stumbled upon multi-page scanning with Scan. That's a big plus. I also stumbled upon the contrast control with the main app - good to have it.
- dropbox Scan is not stand-alone. after starting, you eventually get to a screen with a single button: start the dropbox app. when you do that, you can then choose “scan a document” from within the dropbox app (not in the Scan app now). after you’ve scanned your first document, a NEW button appears in Scan to capture the second document, and from then on you are not forced to use the Dropbox app, even if you deleted all the documents. I’m guessing it’s done like this because Scan has no way to choose the Dropbox you’re going to put your scan into, IOW, it is NOT stand-alone FOR AUTHENTICATION. This is a design disaster; users will repeat the first sequence they learn, and so they will never learn to start the Scan app first.
