Windows Scan

Windows Scan is an application that ships with Windows that can be used with scanners to scan photos and documents. This application was first made available for Windows 8. It does not ship with Windows, but can be installed for free from the Windows Store.

This application should not be confused with Windows Fax and Scan which is an older application that actually ships with Windows.

I recently wanted to scan some documents with my HP DeskJet 2130 printer-scanner-copier and tried to see how this Windows application compares to HP’s own application. I found the application to be quite basic, missing the features I needed:

• Supported export to these file formats: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, Bitmap, OpenXPS, XPS and PDF. PDF is the format that I used to save documents, so I was glad to see that supported.
• There are 3 color modes: Color, Grayscale and Black and White.
• Resolution (DPI) can be chosen from a dropdown list.
• There is a preview feature to get a low-resolution scan quickly. The scanning rectangle has to be manually resized though.
• There is no support to scan multiple pages and save them to a single paginated document like a PDF file.
• There is no support to rotate the scanned image or document.

Tried with: Windows 10