APP Review :Hands-on Microsoft Office Lens vs INTSIG CamScanner

Since change of leadership at Microsoft, it has been taking some pretty nice steps in mobile apps department.  Making its apps available on all major mobile stores and that to for free. Recent spat of acquisition like accompli mail client(Rebranded as Microsoft Outlook preview ) for mobiles,  Sunrise calendar etc are some pretty good and surprising moves by the tech giant. 

 

To take one step itself ahead in game of providing end to end office/productivity solution on mobile platforms Microsoft has launched Office Lens a document scanner for android and Apple IOS. It was launched for Windows Phone last year .It is still in beta mode for android  for testers to test and full version has been launched for Apple IOS. In-spite of being in beta period  it would be compared with existing document scanners available on mobile app stores.  Today we are going to compare Microsoft Office lens with leading document scanner INTSIG CamScanner. I think this is first such review for Microsoft Office Lens.

 

 

Microsoft Office Lens

Office lens is useful when you are in hurry and want to upload the document really fast. The images shot in Office lens are pretty clean and make document scanning a ease even in low light. It is large download almost 30mb on my phone. Office lens gives a functionality of saving the document to onenote, word, PowerPoint, Excel, your gallery as a image, pdf etc. Which means you can seamlessly integrate with your office suite sitting on your mobile. As I said earlier it’s a wonderful step to complete end to end MS office suite for mobiles. Office lens allows you to search docs saved in onenote using Optical character recognition(OCR) but is not refined as CamScanner’s OCR. Office Lens definitely lacks advanced features provided by CamScanner. Maybe those will come in upcoming versions.

 

 

CamScanner 

CamScanner has been my favorite all these days working as my portable scanner for all my documents send through my mobiles. It has been a reliable partner when it comes to taking clean scanned docs. Almost everyone I know uses CamScanner as a portable mobile scanner. But still CamScanner falls behind office lens when it comes to automatic cleaning of scanned copy. You need to have more steady hand when scanning document with CamScanner. Whereas its a breeze scanning with office lens. But when it comes to cleaning the document with given filters and options, CamScanner is way ahead of office lens. The Optical character recognition(OCR) in CamScanner works flawlessly. In the sharing department CamScanner allows share as pdf and jpeg. It provides usual share using other apps. So you can share using Google, Outlook, one note, Google keep etc. Pretty decent in this department.

 

Verdict

Microsoft Office lens

Microsoft Office lens is best when you want a no frills application with clean interface, great scanning capability, awesome automated clean scans.

 

CamScanner 

CamScanner is useful when you want to have portable scanner with great capability as a clean scanner,varied options to edit and crop the document and greats options to share using other apps in your phone.

 

My choice : Microsoft Office lens for quick scanning capability and seamless integration with Microsoft office apps.

 

Microsoft Office Lens IOS | Microsoft Office Lens Android