Snapter Turns Your Digital Camera Into a Scanner

These days, I need to scan or fax a document about once every six months -- far too infrequently to bother owning either a fax or a scanner. Recently, I had to e-mail someone a scanned document. Rather than trudging over to Kinkos, I used Snapter to scan the document with my digital camera.

Snapter takes your photograph of a single page document, business card, white board, or an open book and converts it into a perspective-adjusted document that looks like it was taken true and square, as if by a flatbed scanner. Indeed, the results are so good that you can take a snapshot of a document, process it through Snapter, and e-mail the resulting document without warming up your scanner ever again. If you even have a scanner.

Admittedly, the program is a little finicky; you'll need to make sure there's nothing else in the frame besides the document you're photographing, for instance, and extreme contrast variations in the document can confuse the program. But by and large, it works great.

You can save your scanned document as a JPEG or a PDF. Snapter costs $20, but that's a lot less than a $100 scanner you'll only use twice a year. Even better, it comes with a 30-day free trial and it is still fully functional afterwards, as long as you don't mind a watermark through the middle of the image.

If Snapter sounds familiar, that's because previously mentioned Web services Qipit and scanR offer similar capabilities -- no software required.