How to Use Qipit: Copy or Print All Things Digital

As a pointed out in an article are wrote a few weeks ago, the digital camera opens up all sorts of new possibilities for scanning documents. I first discovered this when, upon browsing through pictures I'd taken with my digital camera, I came upon a picture of my friend, standing next to a table with a newspaper lying on it. Upon zooming in, I noticed that I could read the text of the newspaper. Of course, they immediately proceeded to apply this technique to scanning documents. Just take a picture of it, I found, and there it was, quite legible, if not particularly neat. Quite suited to optical character recognition.

However, I recently came across an improvement this method. Qipit.com, a website I recently discovered, offers the ability to take the taking-a-picture-of-a-document method to the next level. You take a picture the document, send it to them, and they will send you back a clean, properly oriented, cropped, and clearly legible version of the document. All free of charge. In addition to using this method to scan important documents, you can use it to digitalize your notes, or even to take pictures of a chalkboard.

To begin, you must sign up at Qipit's site. Provide them with your name, e-mail address, desired username and password, and a few other little tidbits of information, and off you go.

Additionally, it is possible to provide Qipit with your cell phone number. This way, you can send pictures taken with your camera phone directly to Qipit, whereupon they will automatically associate the pictures with your account and process them accordingly. However, please read the note the bottom explaining why this is not a great idea.

Once you've set up your account, you're ready to go! Qipit's site allows you to e-mail photos directly, or to upload them online. Once received, Qipit we'll process them, cropping the image to the dimensions of the page, straightening the page, and fixing bad lighting. The processed file will then be available for you to download. Conveniently, however, all your documents will remain on their website, accessible to you whenever you want them. If you'd like, you can even publish them, allowing your friends to see them. This could potentially provide a convenient way to work and group projects, sharing physical notes and drawings the way you would computer files.

If the reason you're scanning a document is to run it through an optical character recognition program, extracting the text from it, try using the photo directly before you run it through Qipit. If it is a reasonably good photograph, it is likely that your OCR program we'll be able to recognize it right off the bat, saving you a step.

Note: although Qipit's site claims that it is able to use pictures taken with your camera phone, unless you have a camera phone with particularly high resolution, you'll likely not have great luck with this. The resolution of an average camera phone, 640x480 pixels, is just not sufficient to get a clear view of the page. Text will be blurry and a legible, and certainly not suited to optical character recognition. This is a real bummer, since it would be so convenient to be able to use your phone to simply take a picture of a blackboard in class. Oh well.