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I am designing a product that has a feature for end users to scan/upload visual and text work. The quality needs to be good. The user demographic is not very tech savvy. Question is what is the best user friendly tool out there that I can integrate in the website?

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What do you expect them to use for scanning? Camera/scanner/etc? – dnbrv Mar 15 '12 at 20:59
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What is the tool for? We need a whole lot more information here. – DA01 Mar 15 '12 at 21:01
By scan do you mean operate a scanner in the real world, or just upload an image? It's very hard to tell what you're asking here – Ben Brocka♦ Mar 15 '12 at 21:33

closed as not a real question by DA01, ChrisF, Vitaly Mijiritsky, JonW♦ Mar 16 '12 at 7:41

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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As you probably know, three big problems with letting users use their own scanners are:

  1. Sheer variety of scanner devices
  2. Sheer variety of scanning software that come with these devices.
  3. A lot of people don't understand the concept of pixels, resolution, DPI, let alone other settings that we take it for granted.

This is why many banks that do support customer side check-scanning prefer to either write their own software (for the case of mobile devices), or just issue their own device designed specifically for scanning checks.

Assuming custom hardware & software combo is not an option, I would look into Active-X or JAVA based TWAIN solutions. TWAIN takes care of the device variability issue. But you'll also have to minimize user variability by customizing your software to provide guided flows and limit scanning parameters to prevent things like:

  1. user having to first save documents onto their desktop before uploading. (or not uploading, because they can't find it anymore)
  2. user scanning at 2400 dpi and uploading 90MB TIFF file
  3. user scanning documents in wrong orientation and not knowing how to fix it
  4. overscan and underscan of intended area.

etc...

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Given how ambiguous the question is, it's a bit too early to give such deep answers. – dnbrv Mar 16 '12 at 2:56

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