ExactScan 20.1

ExactScan is intended to scan printed materials. It is compatible with a long list of more than 400 flatbed scanners of different manufacturers, including HP, Fujitsu, Canon, Oki, Avision and Xerox, which is great as not all these models are readily supported by macOS.

Although the tool is not too difficult to use, it is good there is help available online.

ExactScan has a straightforward tabbed interface, which lets you manage all the scanning process from a single window. There is also a retractable panel that allows previewing the scanned material before actually saving it to disk.

Luckily, the application comes with multiple scanning profiles, such as Color PDF, Gray PDF, B/W PDF, Color Copy, Gray Copy, B/W Copy, Color Email, Gray Email and Photos. Moreover, you can manage these profiles with operations like deleting them or adding new ones. Fortunately, using profiles allows you to set various default parameters, including target folder, type of format and quality. In this regard, various common file formats are supported (PDF, JPG, TIFF, RTF, PNG, BMP and PNM). Likewise, it is possible to use customized file naming patterns.

The application’s basic settings let you manage other important parameters. For instance, you can pick an output resolution, use a custom size, apply rotation and adjust sensitivity. But that is not all, if you go to Advanced Settings, you can make additional adjustments, like brightness, contrast, gamma, hue, saturation and lightness.

One of the main advantages of ExactScan is the quality of the output. In this respect, the application can automatically reduce print moiré patterns and remove borders and shadows. Similarly, it can sharpen the image, optimize colors to black and white, as well as smooth uniform colors. I also liked the possibility of creating searchable PDF documents, but regrettably this feature did not work as accurately as expected.

All in all, ExactScan comes with multiple features that make it a good choice if you are looking for a scanning application, like its support of many models of scanning machines and its capacity to automatically eliminate various types of unwanted artifacts. The product is shareware, which means you can try it at no cost. Unfortunately, its price may seem somewhat high if we consider that many scanners come with their own applications.