Best OCR Model for Scanned Documents, Measured

The author tested 15 vision models plus Mistral OCR and Tesseract on eight synthetic scanned pages scored by character error rate and 264 key-value checks, finding Claude Opus 5.5 most accurate (262 of 264 at $16.42 per 1,000 pages) and Mistral OCR the best value (258 of 264 at $2.02). The post documents failure modes such as fabricated card digits, wifi passwords and server names on a faded receipt, and provides code for transcription, disabling reasoning, cross-checking two models from different labs, and using the mistral-ocr engine.