Vision-capable LLMs vs. OCR for long-document (including charts, images, tables, etc.) QA

In three linesBenchmark on 30 long PDFs (171 questions) comparing vision LLMs vs OCR for document QA. Claude Sonnet 4.5 native PDF: 52% accuracy, $0.2552/query (5th/6). LlamaCloud premium + OCR: 59.6%, $0.1885/query. Vision underperforms on charts/tables; premium OCR more robust. Vision LLM has 7% intrinsic failure rate vs 0% for OCR after retry.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified