Lion's 'Signature Capture' in Preview photographs your written signature to put in PDFs

This new feature in Mac OS X 10.7, discovered by reader Mime454, really wows us. It’s called ‘Signature Capture’ and it allows you to write your signature with a black pen on a piece of paper, hold it up to your Mac’s built-in camera, and place it on a document in Preview. The feature works as advertised and is very seamless.

The image capture is also very quick and mostly accurate. We got decent-to-good results in all of ours tests and the best advice we have is to write very clearly. Following Apple’s instruction to use black pen is also a must. Using a blue pen, for example, gave us washed out results. We see this coming in handy a lot, especially in PDFs, and hopefully Apple makes it a framework that other companies can integrate into their applications.

The feature will surely make its way across the Mac ecosystem, hopefully very soon in the rumored in iWork ’11, and hopefully Microsoft manages to work with Apple in implementing it into the Microsoft Office productivity suite. Do you think you will find this useful? We have a video now after the break. (Thanks Mime454 for the video, Sonny for the image)