Recently I was out at a local restaurant and wanted to share the menu with a foodie friend. I tried to take a photo of it but it came out really badly so I needed to find another way. I turned to the App store for help, and found the highly reviewed Scanner Pro app for iPhone or iPad.

Having downloaded it to my phone, it was a simple job to take a photo of the menu using the app, the built-in guides found the exact corners for me, chopping off any background bits of table, ‘flattening’ it out and creating a digital version I could keep.

Scanner Pro

Once the menu was scanned I could then email it from the app, or upload it to a number of Cloud storage sites including iCloud, Dropbox or Evernote to be accessed at a later date. If I wanted to, I could also print it directly from my phone to a networked printer another time.

The app is currently half price in the iTunes Store: just £1.99 – although even at full price it is well worth having. 

If you’ve got an Android phone, you won’t be able to use Scanner Pro, but Camscanner is highly rated. It works in much the same way and has all the editing and sharing options too. Even better – it’s free and can be used on iPhones as well. We did a quick comparison of it against Scanner Pro and found that Camscanner has many more editing options, but the image quality of the final scan wasn’t quite as clear.

As usual it seems you get what you pay for – much like the food at the local restaurant – here’s the menu – it was delicious.

This week’s blog is an article that we wrote for the local magazine for our neck-of-the-woods, Absolutely Chiswick….

With 300 million photos added to Facebook every day, are picture gifts the last thing people want for Christmas? Not a bit of it – there are few things as precious as photos: we just need to be selective and turn our best shots into something special.

There are dozens of companies on the Internet and High Street who will turn your photos into Christmas presents like mugs, t-shirts, mouse mats and phone covers. But perhaps the best medium for pictures is still paper: a simple photo book makes a great family gift and a personalised Christmas card will be cherished long after Twelfth Night.

The trick is to improve your shots before you hand them over. The easiest way is with a good computer programme such as Apple’s iPhoto or Picasa. This lets you crop, straighten, remove red-eye, adjust the exposure and add effects – you’ll be amazed at how great your pictures look.

Of course it’s not just this year’s holiday snaps that can be turned into gifts. If you have boxes of old photos under the bed, now’s the time to have them scanned (before they fade). Imagine the delight of reliving the 20^th Century with your family this Christmas.

A word of advice: once you’ve done all the hard work, don’t pick the cheapest company to print your mug shots. It’s a competitive market and you’ll get what you pay for.

Lastly, don’t wait until the December rush to start. Give yourself time to sort out your photos and check you are happy with the printed gifts.

Our article finished with a bit of a sales pitch. We now have two state-of-the-art photo scanners at the Fingertips office: a print scanner and a negative/ slide scanner and we were giving them a plug. There are lots of details on our website and for our blog readers we’re offering ⅓ off all scanning up until Christmas.

Scanned from a print at 1200dpi

Zoom in at x100 and there’s still not a pixel to be seen.