Tools of the trade

At the start of the year I decided to invest in an iPad Air 2 to improve the quality of the scans I give to my clients. The latest iPad comes with an 8MP sensor and captures images in 3264x2448 resolution, which is just a fancy way of saying, it's a very good camera.

There are lots of good scanning apps on the market - Scanner Pro, Genius Scan, Turbo Scan- but the one I prefer is called CamScanner. It's extremely easy to use, and when paired with a good camera, like that on the iPad Air 2, it produces very high quality images. Features enable you to crop or enhance the images and to produce JPEG or PDF files.

While the scans won't match the quality of those produced professionally by the instiutions own in-house copying service, they do come very close and are made at a fraction of the cost, both financially and in terms of time. Scanner apps like CamScanner are even pretty good at picking up the sort of blue-biro-scrawl you tend to see on a lot of files and which sometimes yield the most interesting comments.