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Re:Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in sca... by jhoechtl on Monday November 15, 2021 @02:29AM (#29224766)
Scanners have the advantage not to distort the image what a photo inherently does. I do not know if today's phone cameras regard the spherical distortion, but I doubt as this would require to have several distance measures I guess those cameras don't have.
Re:Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in sca... by watt on Monday November 15, 2021 @02:41AM (#29224825)
It just doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is if the text (information) that's being imaged is readable for person receiving it.

Apps like Office Lens will undistort the pic and it just looks good enough. (App knows you are taking a picture of A4 page, so it knows how to make it look straight + white.)

Re:Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in sca... by ClumsyPilot on Monday November 15, 2021 @12:48PM (#29230149)
Sometimes it does matter - a particularly small font, a colour document, watermarks, etc. Can render it unsuitable.
Re:Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in sca... by Sayrus on Monday November 15, 2021 @04:03AM (#29225281)
I used to use CamScanner. The scanning mode will take a distorted document, find the edges and output a "flattened" document. For me, this was usually more than enough to look like a scan.
Re:Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in sca... by ydant on Monday November 15, 2021 @07:35AM (#29226609)

  > CamScanner
And then it got bought and malware added. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818177

These days on Android, Google Drive's scan functionality works just as well as CamScanner used to. I use it for a lot of cases where I'd previously use a proper scanner - it's good enough most of the time.

Or even Google Lens / Google Camera does a decent job of scanning in the special scan document mode, although you have to rely on the software actually recognizing that's what you're trying to do to get the button to show up to start the process.