Your Chromebook can make for a handy scanner in a pinch [VIDEO]

If you’ve ever been out and about and needed to mark up a physical document to send to someone quickly, what I’m going to show you today could prove very useful. Granted, most phones have a great camera on them and can scan documents with ease, but then you have to get that file moved and take a few extra steps that maybe you don’t have time for. Enter the Chromebook scanner function in the Chromebook Camera app.

And, before you say anything, I know Chromebooks have had the scanner functionality in the Camera app for quite some time. To be honest, I simply never messed with it because I’ve never felt the need to. But a circumstance came up the other day where I needed to quickly communicate a change to a printed document to someone online and all of the sudden, I actually had a need for this feature.

When I went to perform the scan, I was impressed by the ability of my Chromebook to auto-detect the document edges and remove most of the skewing I created by not holding the paper correctly. I then made the marks needed on the page with a few strokes from a USI pen to communicate the changes I was suggesting and sent the image on its way. It was easy and quite a bit better than I expected it to be, and that’s why we made this video.

I didn’t know the scanner app was that good at fixing my lackluster ability to square up a piece of paper with the camera lens and I wanted to be sure that if you’ve been ignoring this little, somewhat-hidden feature, that you now know you have it at your disposal down the road.

One last thing, here: if you have a Chromebook Plus model, make sure to turn off your camera’s improved lighting and background blur. With those on, you’ll struggle to get clear, legible text on the image. Removing them both makes things far simpler.

But that’s about it! Again, I know this feature has been around for a bit and I don’t really know when the auto framing and skew correction were added, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? I love finding little corners of ChromeOS that I’ve missed out on that could potentially be helpful to you all. I figure, if I’ve missed it all this time, there’s a good chance some of you out there have as well. Hope it helps someone in a pinch!