can iphone camera be used to photograph/scan a line of text into a readable pic for notes, like a pen scanner? [closed]

Question

pen scanners cost too much and, according to Amazon reviews, might produce bad results, break down and otherwise misbehave. So I was thinking if perhaps iphone could be used as an alternative for scanning a few lines from a textbook here and there into a .DOC notes file.

Is iphone photo quality sufficient for making readable text photos of a page segment? Can iphone camera be used to capture line word by word by moving it across the page (possibly some distance from the page) or will it work only from static position because photographing takes too much time or some other such complication?

Answer 1

You can try the iphone app Genius Scan which is free and can scan to JPG or PDF, and it allows you to play around with the image to adjust the outline of the document, if it doesnt already detect the outline of the page correctly. If there is good lighting and you have a steady hand or prop your elbow on the desk while you take a shot of the document I think it works great. I have also used it to take pictures of diagrams in networking class on the dry erase board.

It has a nice feature to turn the image into black and white to mimick a text document.