This is actually the thing I really desperately need. I'm routinely analyzing contracts that were faxed to me, scanned with monstrously poor resolution, wet signed, all kinds of shit. The big LLM providers choke on this raw input and I burn up the entire context window for 30 pages of text. Understandable evals of the quality of these OCR systems (which are moving wicked fast) would be helpful...

And here's the kicker. I can't afford mistakes. Missing a single character or misinterpreting it could be catastrophic. 4 units vacant? 10 days to respond? Signature missing? Incredibly critical things. I can't find an eval that gives me confidence around this.

There are a bunch of new OCR models.

I’ve also heard very good things about these two in particular:

- LightOnOCR-2-1B: https://huggingface.co/lightonai/LightOnOCR-2-1B

- PaddleOCR-VL-1.5: https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR-VL-1.5

The OCR leaderboards I’ve seen leave a lot to be desired.

With the rapid release of so many of these models, I wish there were a better way to know which ones are actually the best.

I also feel like most/all of these models don’t handle charts, other than to maybe include a link to a cropped image. It would be nice for the OCR model to also convert charts into markdown tables, but this is obviously challenging.

Is it possible for such a small model to outperform gemini 3 or is this a case of benchmarks not showing the reality? I would love to be hopeful, but so far an open source model was never better than a closed one even when benchmarks were showing that.

There was so many OCR models released in the past few months, all VLM models and yet none of them handle Korean well. Every time I try with a random screenshot (not a A4 document) they just fail at a "simple" task. And funnily enough Qwen3 8B VL is the best model that usually get it right (although I couldn't get the bbox quite well). Even more funny, whatever is running on an iphone locally on cpu is insanely good, same with google's OCR api. I don't know why we don't get more of the traditional OCR stuff. Paddlepaddle v5 is the closest I could find. At this point, I feel like I might be doing something wrong with those VLMs.