Scanning Paperbacks with Yellow Background

[Rand1956]

I'm looking at buying a P-150 (on sale at Newegg for $215), and the PC Mag review notes:

"One last feature worth mention is a color dropout option in the driver. If you scan pages printed on color paper in black-and-white mode, the pages often come out solid black. The color dropout option can make the text appear—as I proved in my tests with a document printed on orange paper. Even documents printed on white paper often have similar issues with highlighted text, a situation where this feature can come in handy as well."

Might that help with the yellowed pages?

[kbaerwald]

Originally Posted by Rand1956

Might that help with the yellowed pages?

Yes - I think it will help when you have an even background of one color e.g. dark blue with black characters on it. I found it not so efficient for my special problem with uneven yellowness across the pages plus staines.

As long as either the scanner or the software discriminates well enough in b&w the results are good. My current workflow includes ScanTailor and this proves to be worth the additional effort. I always scan gray now with setting the "brightness" of the scanner to approx. 75% of the scale of the Canon P-150 (whatever the scale means ). This makes the overall appearance of the page a bit pale but helps with the b&w discrimination of ScanTailor at a later point in time. There is one ScanTailor feature i.e. Despeckling that I find more and more useful especially for older books.

As to the P-150: meanwhile I scanned 50 books with an average of 200-400 pages per book without problems. I always use a pack of 40 [edit] sheets to feed into the paper feeder and this still works flawlessly. The failure rate is approx. 5%.

Klaus

[Rand1956]

Impressive, and thanks for the review! I ordered one yesterday and plan to use it much the same way as yours.

[Beryll Snyder]

Originally Posted by kbaerwald

Yes - I think it will help when you have an even background of one color e.g. dark blue with black characters on it. I found it not so efficient for my special problem with uneven yellowness across the pages plus staines.

I always use a pack of 40 [edit] sheets to feed into the paper feeder and this still works flawlessly. The failure rate is approx. 5%.

Klaus

Isn't flawlessly and failure rate of 5% a contradiction in terms?
Maybe I misunderstand you, but if it means that some pages were omitted(not processed) - that is what drove me crazy when using this kind of scanner. Reintegrating the forgotten pages took too much time.

As far as workflow is concerned: do you know "pdfscissors"?

[kbaerwald]

Originally Posted by Beryll Snyder

Isn't flawlessly and failure rate of 5% a contradiction in terms?
Maybe I misunderstand you, but if it means that some pages were omitted(not processed) - that is what drove me crazy when using this kind of scanner. Reintegrating the forgotten pages took too much time.

As far as workflow is concerned: do you know "pdfscissors"?

Maybe it is the wording - 5 sheets out of 100 are being processed in a way that I have to rescan.

This may be due to

- sheets sticking together (rests of spine glue: I did not cut deep enough)
- major parts of the page are not readable (rescan with other brightness settings)
- scanner pulls sheets in slanted

In the meantime I control the sheets before I process them with the scanner. So I can detect sticked sheets easily. Sometimes the friction between the sheets is pretty high because of a rough surface. It always helps when I shake and reorder the pages before scanning so to make the sheets more "movable".

It is also important to arrange the pack of sheets in a "jagged" way to make the feeding easier.

I think the scanning mechanism is not to blame for the majority of problems.

[kbaerwald]

Originally Posted by Beryll Snyder

As far as workflow is concerned: do you know "pdfscissors"?

I looked into it yesterday -- pretty good -- if your interest is just reading with an ereader. Very intuitive handling.

[Beryll Snyder]

Originally Posted by kbaerwald

Maybe it is the wording - 5 sheets out of 100 are being processed in a way that I have to rescan.

This may be due to

- sheets sticking together (rests of spine glue: I did not cut deep enough)
- major parts of the page are not readable (rescan with other brightness settings)
- scanner pulls sheets in slanted

In the meantime I control the sheets before I process them with the scanner. So I can detect sticked sheets easily. Sometimes the friction between the sheets is pretty high because of a rough surface. It always helps when I shake and reorder the pages before scanning so to make the sheets more "movable".

It is also important to arrange the pack of sheets in a "jagged" way to make the feeding easier.

I think the scanning mechanism is not to blame for the majority of problems.

I think we had this kind of discussion before: with the Plustek Bookscanner I can scan may 6 pages a minute. There is no rescanning, checking for completeness and such. As a consequence little concentration is needed - usually I listen to an adiobook during scanning.
So in the end there does not seem to be a lot of difference between the two procedures.