Compare leading OCR and vision-LLM models with real-world benchmarks. We test accuracy, latency, and cost on multilingual PDFs, scans, receipts, invoices, tables, and handwriting, reporting CER/WER and layout fidelity. Includes datasets, prompts, and reproducible scripts to evaluate GPT-4o/Claude/Gemini vs PaddleOCR/Tesseract, with deployment tips for APIs, production pipelines, and monitoring.