about digitally acquiring texts

[megotrafigon]

I'm interested in digitally acquiring documents from historical archives, mostly manuscripts (so no hope for OCR).
The main way is of course by digital scanners but they are slow and in my country it is forbidden to make use of them and a scanning service is not foreseen and where it is the cost is very high.
Secondly it is possible to take digital photos and I read here last year a valuable thread by Ereszet concerning details about fixing the camera and positioning volumes on a V-cradle, the camera being connected to a PC.
Now I was thinking of a more practical way based on photocopiers with scanning capability. I saw some of them but the scanning feature was disabled. Has anyone made use of them? Is it necessary to connect them to a PC or are they stand-alone devices with some output unity (a pen drive would be the best)? Are they enough fast, say the same as a paper copy? What are the manufacturers and the models?
TIA for answers

[borax99]

Hmmm, most of the photocopiers I've seen that have scanning capability scan to an image format (usually .TIF), and in a resolution too low for accurate OCR. Therefore, when you run the resulting TIF through OCR, you would likely get a unacceptable error rate.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by megotrafigon

I'm interested in digitally acquiring documents from historical archives, mostly manuscripts (so no hope for OCR).
The main way is of course by digital scanners but they are slow and in my country it is forbidden to make use of them and a scanning service is not foreseen and where it is the cost is very high.
Secondly it is possible to take digital photos and I read here last year a valuable thread by Ereszet concerning details about fixing the camera and positioning volumes on a V-cradle, the camera being connected to a PC.
Now I was thinking of a more practical way based on photocopiers with scanning capability. I saw some of them but the scanning feature was disabled. Has anyone made use of them? Is it necessary to connect them to a PC or are they stand-alone devices with some output unity (a pen drive would be the best)? Are they enough fast, say the same as a paper copy? What are the manufacturers and the models?
TIA for answers

If your country has laws against scanning, don't bother. Make the cradle, get a 6MP point-and-shoot digital camera that has close-focusing capability and take the pictures. You'll find it's much more reliable.

Derek