Hello everyone. Recently I’ve been wanting to get decent pictures of my graded collection to have for myself. I was interested in trying to get some higher resolution scans of them rather than just regular photos. I don’t own a scanner, so I decided to try using Office Lens. For anyone who doesn’t know, Office Lens is a free app made by Microsoft that lets you scan documents from your phone. Personally I haven’t used a real scanner since this app came out, since it makes scanning and storing documents a lot easier. You’ll want to use the “document” setting, as if you’re scanning a piece of paper.
Anyway, I was actually pretty happy with how it came out:
Not quite as perfect as a scan using a real flatbed scanner, but I was pretty happy with the quality considering it was just with my phone.
This took a couple tries to get it to look good. Here was my first attempt, it came out decently but you can still see the reflection of my phone and phone mount in the PSA case:
What I found worked well for me, was taking a black piece of paper and cutting a hole in it for the camera lens. The PSA case would have a “reflection” of the entire piece of paper, but since it’s so dark and bigger than the PSA case, it actually just slightly darkens the card rather than showing any reflection at all:
Anyway I just figured I would post this in case someone wanted decent scans without owning a high quality scanner, I found it worked pretty well for what I needed.
Wow; that’s a nice scan. I’ve actually tried that app to scan raw cards, but it didn’t come out that well. Do you think that same method could be used to scan raw cards in a way that’s comparable to a flatbed scanner?
I just quickly gave it a try. The lighting in here isn’t the best at night, I’m sure it could look better with proper lighting. Still not bad in general though.
This is a scan I took with a flatbed scanner. There’s no shadows or anything on the card, whereas the Ampharos scan you took has a shadow cast on the top right corner. I’d be curious if there’s a setup with that iPhone app where one could make scans that were just like ones from the flatbed scanner. I’m not sure, but I’m going to give it a try. Regardless, the Ampharos scan is better than what I’ve been able to make so far. So not bad at all!
Yeah, that shadow is because my lighting wasn’t great. I just have a very direct light above that desk so it’s not the best for this. It probably will never get as uniform as a real flatbed of course, but I’m sure with more even natural lighting you could do better than that Ampharos.
Yeah absolutely. I’m just using it to get some clean images to use on my PSA set registry. I’ll probably get a scanner eventually, but I was still surprised at how decent this came out for what it is.
