For those who’ve followed my exploits, you’ll know that scanning is one of the things I still rely on my iMac to accomplish. I only need to scan a handful of times each year so it’s not a big deal. Still, it’s surprised me that there hasn’t been a great solution to this issue, especially when printing was solved so long ago.

I have an HP all in one. It’s networked, and I print to it all the time from my iPad. While following news out of CES I saw that Xerox announced a $249 portable/wireless scanner that could scan directly to an iOS device. I was intrigued. It got me wondering – where has scanning to an iOS device evolved to of late?

A quick search led me to a Wired story about an app called VueScan.

It promised exactly what I’ve been looking for, as well as broad device compatibility. In fact, though the full featured app costs $5 (technically $4.99) they offer a free, stripped down version which you can use to test and ensure that your specific device works with the app. This was important to me because while their device compatibility list included the HP 7700, it didn’t explicitly include the 7780 that I own. I was optimistic – and it does work fine – but having the free app to confirm made me much more comfortable plunking down the $5.

Bottom line: I love this app. It works and works well. I can scan from the document feeder, rotate and/or crop if needed right on my ipad, and attach the scan to an email or save it to outside apps like Dropbox (which is my de facto file system).

Frankly I’m shocked that no one tackled this sooner. Maybe we really do live in an increasingly paperless world. Still, for the few times I need to scan, VueScan does the trick and does it wonderfully. One step closer to retiring my iMac for good. Now if only iTunes match would drop the 25000 song limit, photostream held as many albums and photos as you wanted, and you could also save videos to the Apple cloud…