[ Continuing the thread under subject "wiki...". ] Scanners have pros but because they are dangerous to use, I would prefer digital camera. At least I got fed up to lifting up the book for changing pages. A 600 pages book is quite weighty. Another annoyance was that the scanner collected dust (both from book and from room). Scanner was also slow. A couple of days ago I borrowed a tourist range digital camera. I could digitize 8 pages per minute. It was as fast and easy as I had predicted. The digitization speed was limited only by image transfer technology, not by speed of my fingers. "Easy" is the keyword here. I have invented a couple of camera features which would help in book digitization. Anyone would know how to contact camera manufacturers? Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software
I have invented a couple of camera features which would help in book digitization. Anyone would know how to contact camera manufacturers?
You've "invented" camera features? What hardware did you use when building these features into your camera? What camera model did you use as a base unit? David A. Desrosiers desrod@gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com
At Thu, 17 Mar 2005 22:19:52 +0200, Juhana Sadeharju wrote:
A couple of days ago I borrowed a tourist range digital camera. I could digitize 8 pages per minute. It was as fast and easy as I had predicted. The digitization speed was limited only by image transfer technology, not by speed of my fingers. "Easy" is the keyword here.
How did OCR'ing go? I wonder because the resolution of cheap digital cameras is quite low for scanning. For example, to scan an A4 page (aspect ratio: sqrt(2)) with a usual digital camera (aspect ratio of images: 4:3) in 300DPI, you need a camera with more than nine mega-pixels. -- Felix E. Klee
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:16:04 +0100, Felix E. Klee <felix.klee@inka.de> wrote:
How did OCR'ing go? I wonder because the resolution of cheap digital cameras is quite low for scanning. For example, to scan an A4 page (aspect ratio: sqrt(2)) with a usual digital camera (aspect ratio of images: 4:3) in 300DPI, you need a camera with more than nine mega-pixels.
Let's try something more realistic. Typical book size that I scan is under 8.5x11". Typical page is about 8.5x5.5"; typical text area is 6.5x4" to 7x4.5". So if focused solely on the text area, one would need about 2.2-2.8 megapixels / page, or for a full page impression, about 4.2. Most books do not lie flat enough to get two full page scans from straight up; you're better off doing each page at a time. So a 4 MP camera, with good optical zoom / focus, should be fine. This won't be cheap, but it's not in the same realm as a 9 MP camera. R C
At Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:19:18 -0500, Robert Cicconetti wrote:
How did OCR'ing go? I wonder because the resolution of cheap digital cameras is quite low for scanning. For example, to scan an A4 page (aspect ratio: sqrt(2)) with a usual digital camera (aspect ratio of images: 4:3) in 300DPI, you need a camera with more than nine mega-pixels.
Let's try something more realistic.
Admittedly, for most book scanning tasks the requirements are not as high as I illustrated. However, a simple camera wouldn't fit the need of people that frequently have to create quality scans of pages whose size is around A4 (I'm one of these people). IOW: An ordinary flatbed scanner is probably still the best and cheapest solution for most people. A dream for scanning books, of course, is the BookEye series of scanners that one can sometimes find in some public libraries. -- Felix E. Klee
participants (4)
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David A. Desrosiers -
Felix E. Klee -
Juhana Sadeharju -
Robert Cicconetti