Similar in some ways to the ScanJig and StandScan Pro Power Bundle that I recently reviewed, but far more substantial physically and an order of magnitude more expensive, the Atiz Scandock for Android represents a serious effort to offer a completely different approach to scanning than what you're used to. Whether you think it succeeds or not will depend largely on how well Atiz's approach matches the way you like to work.
In what you might call the traditional approach to scanning, you scan a photo or document and send it to a computer to work with it, store it, and manage it. Most often, the scanner is connected to the computer, and it sends the file immediately. But even with PC-free wand scanners that scan to memory, like the Editors' Choice VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Wi-Fi PDSWF-ST44-VP, you still move the files to a PC later to work with them.
The ScanJet, StandScan Pro, and Scandock are all designed to make it easy to use a smartphone as a scanner. Each one is essentially a stand or dock that gives you an easy way to position your phone and hold it steady to take a picture of an object or document. The resulting file is fully equivalent to a scanned file, using the same file formats as scanners produce.
In all three cases, you can use phone apps to recognize text, edit documents, or otherwise work with the scans. (And, yes, scan is the right word.) But with the ScanJet and StandScan Pro, it is also easy to move the files over to your computer to work with them there. When I tested both, I simply connected the phone to a computer and copied all the scan files to disk at once, the same way I would with files from a wand scanner. The Scandock is different.
Design Choices
Unlike the ScanJet and StandScan Pro, the Scandock is meant to be used with its own app, also called Scandock. The app is designed with the assumption that in addition to using the phone as a substitute for a scanner, you'll also use it as a substitute for a computer. That means taking advantage of phone apps to recognize text, to edit photos and documents, and to forward the files or print them without ever moving them to your computer to work with.
Because of that design assumption, the program doesn't give you any easy way to move the files to a PC. It keeps them in its own library, which makes it impossible to simply connect to your PC with a USB cable and copy them. Instead, you have to go through the work of saving each one to PDF or JPG format first, or emailing each one to yourself individually.
Whether you consider this a Good Thing will depend partly on what you need to do with the scanned files and partly on your personal tastes and work habits. If you need to move the files to a document management program, or need to work with a photo in Photoshop or edit scanned text in a word processor, you probably won't like it. If you don't have to move the files to any particular program on your PC, and don't mind working with a small screen and without a keyboard, it might be just what you're looking for.
Assembly Required
Much like the ScanJet and StandScan Pro, the Scandock comes in pieces that have to be assembled. But instead of inexpensive, and relatively flimsy, laminated card stock (as with the StandScan Pro) or coated polymer board (as with the ScanJig), the Scandock is made from convincingly rugged materials.
More precisely, the Scandock consists of three main pieces: a flat plastic base that serves as the scan bed, an acrylic arm that attaches to the base and reaches upward, and a metal section that attaches to the arm near the top. The metal piece holds four sets of LEDs, with one set positioned roughly over each corner of the scan bed. At the very top of the arm is a small platform, or dock, that hovers over the scan bed. The dock includes a peephole, so you can rest a phone on it with the lens looking through the hole.
Assembling the pieces is fairly straightforward, but there's a lot of guessing involved, since the instructions skip a lot of steps. The most important oversight is a complete lack of instructions for attaching the right dock for the phone you have.
The unit comes with four docks. Before I could put the right one on for my tests, I had to remove the one that was already attached. The first time I picked the wrong screws to remove and then had to reassemble what I had inadvertently taken apart. The second time I managed to get it right. Atiz says it's aware of the problem with the instructions and is working on improving them.
Scanning
Once you have the unit put together, it offers an elegant designer look to complement your décor. The only additional setup step is to plug in the power adaptor for the LEDs and download the Scandock app from the Google Play Store.
I ran into some problems with the Scandock for Android app running on a Samsung Galaxy S III phone. Scanned images don't always show up where they're supposed to right away for example. To get to them, you have to leave the app and relaunch it. It also crashed several times during my tests. However, this sort of bugginess is typical for 1.0 versions of any software, and Atiz is working on fixing bugs as they show up.
The app also has a noticeable learning curve, which is another issue that Atiz says it's aware of and working on. Once you get familiar with it, however, it's acceptably easy to use, as long as you don't need to do something it isn't designed for, like moving a batch of scans to your computer.
One of the more sophisticated features in the app is automatic color correction. The Scandock hardware includes a strip at the top with blocks of color and levels of gray. The software knows what those colors and gray levels are supposed to be, and can, in theory at least, use it to automatically adjust color in the scanned image. If you prefer, you can also turn processing off and use the raw scan instead.
One potential issue for the Scandock is that because there's a fixed distance between the platform where the phone is and the scan bed below, any given phone may or may not work with it, depending on the phone's field of view. In my tests, the Galaxy S III worked nicely, but neither a Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX nor an HTC Droid Incredible could see the entire scan bed. You can find a list of supported models at www.scandock.com/support.
Assuming you have a phone with a suitable field of view, the actual process of scanning is simple. Position the phone so it can see the scan bed through the peephole, and choose the on-screen Scan button.
One unusual issue for positioning the scan target is that the Scandock comes with a sticky mat that's meant to hold paper flat, even with pages that have folds in them. Unfortunately, the stickiness also makes it hard to pick up a page to move on to the next one, so you may prefer to scan without the mat. For document scanning, you can put a stack of pages on the document bed and work your way through them fairly quickly. I found I could scan about 7 pages per minute with the mat, or about 10 pages without it.
Performance
Scan quality with the Scandock will depend partly on your phone and partly on the Scandock app. The app did a good job with both cropping and color with some of the photos in our standard test suite. However it had problems with others. In particular, on photos with dark areas along one or more edges, it couldn't find the edges of the photos to crop them, and colors came out dark and oversaturated, to the point of being a little muddy. If you run into that problem, you can turn the automatic processing off and use the app's manual cropping feature, but it's not easy to crop the image well on such a small screen.
The app doesn't include an optical recognition (OCR) feature, so any results for OCR will vary not just with the phone you use but with the OCR software you pick. For my tests, using our standard OCR test documents, I moved the files to a PC (with some effort) and used Abbyy FineReader 9.0 to recognize the text.
The results were much worse than with most standard scanners, with the combination of Scandock, phone, and FineReader failing to read either our Times New Roman or Arial test pages even at sizes as large as 12 points without making at least one mistake. On the plus side, it made only a few mistakes at 12 points in each font. But if I needed to correct the mistakes as part of the OCR step, I'd definitely want to be typing on a full-size keyboard on a PC rather than be stuck with the small smartphone screen the Scandock app assumes you'll want to use.
Whether you'll like this overall approach to scanning will depend both on how you like to work and what you have to do with the scans once you have them. If you like the basic approach, the Atiz Scandock for Android will certainly be of interest. The app needs some work, and I look forward to seeing later, better versions. The good news is that the hardware side of the package offers a solid foundation for Atiz to build on.
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