Quote:
Originally Posted by tarihci
@delphidb96:
Thanks for the idea, Derek. Of course, I tried this option before. I even bought a Nikon P90 to do this. It has a special mode for document photographing. It produces pretty nice results.
There are two problems:
(1) in order to finish it faster, you need a camera with a remote shutter release, otherwise it is really more of a hassle. Mine (although a very good and pricey camera) does not have this option.
(2) photographing (if you need high resolution results for future OCRing) produces HUGE files. Scanning B&W with 360dpi, a 300 page book produces (depending on the # of images in the book) a ~30MB file. Photographing produces at least many times bigger files for a equal resolution result.
I am very interested in the other method you mentioned, the webcam. I always thought of photographing with a digital camera, but have never considered photographing with a webcam before...This does not help producing bigger files, but definitely solves the remote shutter release problem. I guess bigger files can be fixed with a bigger external HDD.
Could you write the webcam that you bought, 5MP sensor for $20? And, other webcams that you considered? I would appreciate all kinds of information on your setup, maybe also a few pictures of the setup...? 
Thanks in advance.
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Aside from this, I am still curious and I still want to learn about the difference btw Epson and Ricoh scanning technology... |
Well, how about *this* one???
20.0 Mega USB 3-LED Webcam
Part of the problem is that I'm still at the "place a sheet of Plexi flat on the book and hold the webcam" stage of taking images. They 'work' but I've only got two hands so it gets a bit complicated. I'm in the process of building a framework to hold everything in place.
A 5MP webcam saving directly to jpeg isn't all that bad to work with. And as for storage space - did you happen to notice these things called external hard drives??? You see, you pick up one for about $50 on eBay - say a 320GB or 500GB model - and use that as your target drive for the webcam - that helps. And then you scrupulously delete all jpeg page image files as soon as you've created your document file. Even so, a 320GB HD can hold about 10,000 ebooks in jpeg page images format!
Derek