Prizmo Review: Scanner-less Scanning

These days, you can get a printer/scanner/fax/copier combo for pretty much nothing when buying a new computer. Half the time, the scanner function is only so-so, the printer is big (and heavy) and the ink is way too expensive. Well, I’m sorry to say I can’t fix the ink problem“You could try refilling cartridges though“But I can help you with the scanner issue. There is a new application, exclusively for Mac, that allows you to scan images without a scanner, but with a camera. You’re probably thinking, “I can already do that.” You can, but you probably won’t get a straight image, or lens distortion. Well, Prizmo can.

The purpose of Prizmo is to scan without a scanner. So, you can scan anywhere (so long as you have a digital camera [no, a film camera will not work]), on-the-go, at anytime. And, it only takes about three steps: Take the picture, open Prizmo and load the picture, and select the part of the picture you want and do a little bit of tweaking.

When you open Prizmo, you are presented with a nice animation telling you where to drop your image. But, there’s also a button that allows you to choose an image from a camera that’s connected to your computer or your iPhoto or Aperture library. Although Prizmo will accept most image types, I have had issues when feeding it RAW files, so you may want to convert to JPEG first (if you shoot in RAW).

As soon as you find your picture and drag it into Prizmo, you will so the editing window. This is where you will put the bounding box around the object you would like to ‘scan.’ The bounding box gives you four points to put at the four corners of the thing you are scanning. If you’re trying to scan a triangle, or a five-and-more-sided-figure, then you’re out of luck. Here, you will also find options for crop, lens distortion and processing. The crop tool just allows you to choose a size to constrain to. Processing just gives you options for brightness, contrast, sharpness and saturation.

Now for lens distortion. This can be a problem when trying to scan objects, because it, well…Distorts your images. Not many people will know how much to pull the distortion sliders, and Creaceed thought of that. They allow you to calibrate your camera, and even get data from other users’ calibrations. If you click the Search button, Prizmo will look through its online database for calibrations from people with the same camera (and lens for DSLRs). But, if it doesn’t find any, you can do it yourself. Just go to Tools>Calibrate Camera… (Command-K) and you will be presented with an assistant for calibrating your camera. Because no data was there for my camera and lens, I decided to do this. After following the directions and taking some pictures, it failed to recognize the checkered pattern on any of them. I was doing it in RAW at the time, so that could have been an issue. Then, though, I converted them to JPEGs and tried to add them, but they wouldn’t add. It seems there needs to be some fixing in the calibration.

Prizmo retails for $39.95, and you can download a free trial from the site. My results were great, despite not being able to calibrate for lens distortion, and it could definitely act as my only scanner. But, it really isn’t only a scanner, it can be used on anything. If you see a movie poster or an ad that you like, and would like to have documented, just take a picture, and Prizmo will help you with perspective, cropping and everything else.

share permalink ping 2 Comments