[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by tarihci

Hi All,
This is my first post. I discovered this forum a while ago and have been coming back for all sorts of information, but did not feel the need to register before. Now, I have a serious question I need to ask you guys.

I am a PhD student. After I read a book, I scan (B&W, 360dpi) and archive it in my PDF library. (I have ABBYY FineReader9 and I can OCR them, but I do not have the time or the processing power for the moment. I usually archive them in raw format.)
Our library provided us two Epson Expression 10000XL (Amazon Link) scanners and they are beautiful. The drivers, firmware, and Epson software are all up to date.
My only problem is the speed. It takes about 1,5hrs (90min) to scan a 300-400 page book. I scan two pages at once; so, one scan motion takes 27-36 seconds. The optic eye (bright/green light) of this scanner (similar to all the scanners I have previously seen/used) moves slowly to capture all the document. Why do I think it is slow?

Recently, I found out that the big photocopier (Ricoh Aficio MP4000) [link] at our department also has a scanning function and I saw the secretary use it. (Students are not allowed to use it.) This machine scans in a very different way and speed. It takes 20 minutes to scan a 300 page book, two pages at a time. So, one scan motion takes 8 seconds.
While you can follow Epson scanning the document slowly, the optic eye (bright/green light) of Ricoh moves very fast in one quick motion from beginning to the end, and the document is scanned.
It is hard to explain the difference of speed between Epson and Ricoh in writing; but, if I can correlate, (1) Epson's speed is similar to someone slowly moving his/her finger on each and every one of the lines in a page from top to bottom and (2) Ricoh's speed is similar to turning a page. It is that fast. [I can try and provide video if people are interested.]

I tried to Google if there are different scanning technologies in today's scannners, but I could not find anything specific. The product pages did not help either.

Epson is around $3000 and the Ricoh is around $5000. I know I cannot afford to buy these machines, especially the Ricoh; however, if I can find out the specific technological feature of Ricoh, I can look for a cheaper model with the same technology.

This turned out to be a long post, but I hope I managed to present my question clearly. I thought, since many people here are quite informed about scannners, one of them might know about the difference of speed between the two machines and the underlying technology.
Looking forward to hearing your comments,
Best,

So why not get a 5MP digital camera and set up a rig to capture each page to JPG file. Then run the JPG files through the OCR software. There are several rigs that use Canon point-and-shoot 5MP and 6MP cameras. But even cheaper is getting one of the new generation webcams. There are several out there that have a 5MP sensor instead of the 640x480 or 1.3MP sensors in the older models. The one I found ran $20 *NEW* on eBay and connects directly to your computer so with the book cradle, light and plexiglas page hold-downs, you should be able to get it set up for under $60. And snapping images happens as fast as you can flip pages. I'm trying to decide whether I want to just get two of the buggers - one for left page and one for right - or set the webcam's mount to let me tilt it left and right to capture each page.

Derek