Have you EVER wanted to scan that old book?

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by chainring

it feeds 'em right on through and does it at a rate of about one page in 5 or so seconds.

Is that per side or for both sides?

When I have a good rythim going, I can do typical paged books at 300dpi at about 10 seconds per "side" (meaning from the time one scan starts to the next scan starts, including time flipping pages) on my Opticbook.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by chainring

ABBYY FineReader default is 300dpi or 600dpi. The thing I like about the 2050C is the almost straight paper path, which is somewhat rare. Scanning heavy paper stock is much easier with this unit than those that make the paper bend around, almost in a U shape.

As for the software, I haven't used it since I have ABBYY FineReader 10, which kills just about everything else for OCR duties. It's astounding how accurate FR can be with a good scan. I do have the bundled software, which is OmniPage Pro, I believe, and can try that out.

I have FineReader 7, and prefer to use 400dpi scans for paperbacks; 300 works but gets troublesome on tiny footnote text sometimes. I might wind up figuring out if it'd interface with Pixedit for the actual scanning, and then import the images to Finereader.

[Spirity]

Originally Posted by Blackguard

If you are interested in going that route, you should look at what the open-source and diy community over at DIY Book Scanner Forums is up to. I'm currently scanning at about 400 pages in 20 minutes using a setup based on most of the builds at that forum. When I was using an OpticBook, I that would take me about an hour, if not more. Of course, scanning and OCR is the easy part of the operation. Proof-reading is the real rate-limiting step.

Hey Blackguard, I've been reading through the diybookscanner forum - some are quite involved and a few are a little more down to earth. There was one guy who used metal picture frames in his design for the platen- that was clever.

What kind of camera are you using? I'd love to see a photo sometime of your setup..400 pages in 20 minutes? WOW! lol

I'm impressed with what they've done, but don't know if I could pull it off!

To everyone who have made the leap and purchased the Optibook:

I'm still wanting one - just hoping you will continue to share how it's running for you-

[stustaff]

Can anyone suggest the best lens choice/ settings for a DSLR set up.

Im scanning quite heavy image based pages and ideally want to end up with a 600dpi image of each page(so a TIF at about 6mb)

Thanks

[chainring]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

Is that per side or for both sides?

When I have a good rythim going, I can do typical paged books at 300dpi at about 10 seconds per "side" (meaning from the time one scan starts to the next scan starts, including time flipping pages) on my Opticbook.

That's for both sides. In FineReader, it's just a checkbox to turn on duplex scanning. You feed it through like normal. The page going through the scanner is the same, just FineReader takes a bit longer to read both sides of a duplex scan vs. a simplex scan.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I have FineReader 7, and prefer to use 400dpi scans for paperbacks; 300 works but gets troublesome on tiny footnote text sometimes. I might wind up figuring out if it'd interface with Pixedit for the actual scanning, and then import the images to Finereader.

Yeah, if you have smaller text, a higher dpi is good. 300dpi is fast, but when turned up to 600dpi (the recommended for small text), it is noticeably slower. Still, feeding through a stack of pages and duplex scanning is the ultimate in ease.

[thinkpad]

I scan one page in 10 seconds and then I have to flip the book to scan the other page. So before page-turning I would be up to 20 seconds. The upside is that I get very good quality scans with hardly no OCR-errors at all, so getting a good scan result will save you time on the proof-reading.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by stustaff

Can anyone suggest the best lens choice/ settings for a DSLR set up.

Im scanning quite heavy image based pages and ideally want to end up with a 600dpi image of each page(so a TIF at about 6mb)

Thanks

I'd recommend asking this at http://www.diybookscanner.org/

[thinkpad]

I started scanning my second book and it turned out much harder than the first one. It came as a paperback with tight margins making it hard for the scanner to get a good result, I ended up cutting the book and then feeding the pages to the scanner one by one, doing this I could also ignore the page rotation in the software. I'm about half way through.

[rebarnmom]

I tried to do a keyword search, but I didn't find this in any posts, so forgive me and clue me in to any thread where it's discussed.

Anyway, I just saw an ad for something called the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand portable scanner. It looks pretty interesting, but the tech/specs don't mean a lot to my non-techie brain and it looks like the file format is jpeg. So, I'm wondering if the would be a decent thing to use for book scanning for my Sony. It's in the most recent Bed, Bath & Beyond flyer for $99 (which would be less with one of their coupons). Anyone know anything about this or have an opinion to share?

http://video.bedbathandbeyond.com/v/...anner-gadgets/

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...y=#ReviewStart

[TGS]

It might be an OK way of getting data into and OCR programme, but the quality of the ebooks you get out of it might be a product of how good the OCR is - and how patient you are at cleaning it up.

[rebarnmom]

Originally Posted by TGS

It might be an OK way of getting data into and OCR programme, but the quality of the ebooks you get out of it might be a product of how good the OCR is - and how patient you are at cleaning it up.

OCR? (I may be geeky, but I'm not very techie!)

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by rebarnmom

OCR? (I may be geeky, but I'm not very techie!)

Optical character recognition

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by stustaff

Can anyone suggest the best lens choice/ settings for a DSLR set up.

Im scanning quite heavy image based pages and ideally want to end up with a 600dpi image of each page(so a TIF at about 6mb)

Thanks

A prime lens at its sharpest aperure will work.
I've used a Canon 50mm @ F/4 and a Canon 100mm @ F/8

But I think every modern lens-camera system is more than enough for the job.

If you've got distortion problems just widen your field of view and keep the paper in the center of the frame: it's where lenses do their best.