Comment by gdudeman

In my experience starting with Gemini 2.5 Pro, moving to 3 and 3.1, 3.5 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and finally 3.7 Flash, 3.7 Flash is just as good if not better than 3 especially on high resolution mode (same token count per page as 3.1).

I run complicated, messy PDFs through these models. 2.5 Pro required a lot of kludgy hacks to get it to fully "see," but from 3.1 pro on I've removed many of them and haven't spotted problems.

3.7 Flash scores better than 3.1 pro on most benchmarks, leading me to believe that even if your OCR requires reasoning to interpret text or data, 3.7 Flash is probably going to be better.