[akrotkov]

The lack of a low end scanner market could also be attributed to the fact that everyone these days has a device with a camera that is either good enough or in some cases better for digitizing documents than those old scanners.

[Stevvo]

Are phones really better? A scanner has uniform and perfect lighting every time. On a phone there are often issues with glare or shadows.

[chmod775]

Someone is going to "solve" that with AI, if they didn't already.

Yeah it might randomly decide to swap out a few words, sentences, and numbers, but it looks really good!

[joenot443]

They’re better in the sense that they are in your pocket and take fractions of the time to use.

The app iScanner really does work very well. The glare and shadow issues are trivial to solve with good CV these days, the resulting documents are pretty damn close to a hardware scan.

I had to fill out a bunch of forms when I transferred my car to the US, and everyone along the way seemed perfectly happy with photo scans.

[ornornor]

A phone won’t match of course but it comes surprisingly close for “scanning” documents and sending them to your insurer or whoever wants them. It’s able to remove noise, crop to the page edges, and deskew the whole image.

[justsomehnguy]

99% of usage is scanning office documents. Sure, with a flatbed you don't need to bother with perspective correction, but 99% of times it's get scanned, mailed and forgotten forever, so nobody bothers.