Most of us have lots of PDF documents, books, or even lots of paper notes from classes, meetings, and daily work. After a meeting, you may want to get your paper drafts to a nice note on the computer. Usually, this means scanning and saving those notes, but regular scanners don’t preserve the text of a document.
If you want OCR support for your PDFs or images accurately and reliably, Prizmo is one app that you can’t miss.
Contents
What is Prizmo?
Prizmo is a scanner app for your Mac that can scan and recognize text documents, business cards, and images. It helps you easily retrieve the text of these documents. It features high-accuracy OCR, support for 23 languages, image correction, and translation capabilities.
How Does Prizmo Work?
After Prizmo is installed on your computer, you will see an interface as in the screenshot below.
Scan
At the top of the interface, there are three different kinds of files that Prizmo can work with: Text, Business card, and Image.
There are also many ways that you can import files you want to scan including drag & drop, open & search, shoot with iPhone, etc.
One neat feature is that when you choose “Shoot with iPhone”, the app syncs with your iPhone to prepare for taking a picture and scanning a document. After shooting, the picture or scanned document will be shown on your computer right away.
Once the document is imported to Prizmo, you can rotate the file, crop it, adjust the dimensions, adjust brightness, change the contrast, and much more.
OCR – Optical Character Recognition
The Recognize button in the top right allows the text of the image to be converted into digital characters. All scanned text from the image will be shown on the right side of the interface.
This is a super useful function that saves you tons of time if you need to copy and paste, or for checking the accuracy of the OCR.
Prizmo recognizes the text as separate regions. If you want to add specific regions of the text, you can do so by hand and the text will be added to the right side.
Each region of text can be translated into other languages and can be read aloud by your computer. If the text didn’t recognize correctly, you can also edit it.
When everything is ready, you can share or save your document in many places.
iCloud is integrated into Prizmo, so no matter what changes you made to the documents they can be accessed from any of your Apple devices. If you use a different cloud service, Prizmo supports Google Drive, Dropbox, and Evernote.
You can also save your document as a file just to your hard drive if you don’t need to back it up.
Price And Platform Compatibility
As of this writing, Prizmo is only available for macOS and iOS.
Prizmo has two versions: Basic and Pro. You can see more details about the difference below.
The basic version costs $49.99 and the Pro Pack $74.99. Prizmo basic has a free trial, which is meant to test the app as well as its OCR before purchase.
There are a few limitations, however (the text is sometimes not fully recognized and is replaced by bullets), so it’s always best to use the paid version as the whole text of the document will otherwise not be recognized.
Prizmo is also available in Setapp, a subscription app service that costs $9.99 per month (7-day free trial). With a subscription, you are free to access hundreds of great Mac apps, not just Prizmo.
Is Prizmo Worth It?
If you are a student or you have to deal with lots of PDF documents at work, Prizmo is a great OCR tool. You can use it to edit your notes, save documents, and access them everywhere.
It’s not very cheap, but if you plan to use it regularly it will pay off quickly. On the other hand, if you only need to occasionally scan a document, there are other software more suited for the job.
Overall, it is a very reliable OCR tool that makes scanning much easier.
Wrapping Up
Prizmo is not only a scanner, but also an outstanding tool that supports OCR, image adjustments, and other key features. It’s easy to use from start to finish.
With the integrated share function, you can access those scan papers anywhere anytime. Prizmo is a reliable program to use with your text document and images.
