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From: Brad Templeton on 24 Nov 2007 22:22
I'm forming a "scanner club" which will be a group of people who
together get a high-end scanner and other associated equipment on eBay,
and then share it around to scan lots of our documents, and when done,
re-sell it on ebay. Since the loss from buy to resell should be
modest divided up among a group of people, price is _almost_ no object.

I blogged some of the main parameters of my quest here:
http://ideas.4brad.com/forming-scanner-club

But let me summarize some of the questions, and ask for recommendations
from the group. The signs seem to point towards a "production" or
"departmental" class scanner from Fujitsu, Panasonic or Canon. While
the usual things people look for in such scanners -- speed, size,
quality etc. are important -- to me a fairly important element is how
good the ADF is at handling household papers, which have the odd corner
turned over, and have often been folded at one point.

For OCR purposes, you want 300 to 400dpi available. Disk space is very
cheap these days. For magazines, you want colour or gray. You
don't want to spend a lot of time fussing so you want good quality
automatic thresholding, de-skew and the ability to handle documents of
different sizes in the pile. I think having an 11" wide scanner is
useful both for fast landscape scans and odd sized documents.

Fujitsu scanners appeal to me because there are linux drivers for most
of them, and I run linux on my new, fast machines. However, if I
have to run under windows, having USB may be important because I can run
windows in a virtualizer and hand it a USB device, but can't do that as
well with a SCSI device. USB is also more useful for a shared scanner
passed around from home to home. However, the older generation SCSI
scanners are quite nicely priced on eBay and it may be a shame to waste
that if you're not scared of putting in a card.

Another scanner recommended to me is the Panasonic KV-S2055/Kodak 2500D.
It is monochrome, but can be had as low as $500 on eBay. Scanners like
the Fujitsu 5650c have gone for as low as $2K on eBay and can be had
refurb for $3K. (A Fi-4860 went for under $2K yesterday.) Canon
production scanners are also popular there. There are no linux drivers
for those as far as I know, nor for Panasonic except the older KV-SS25
series.

We'll also get a commercial paper cutter able to slice the spines off
paperbacks and magazines. Will these scanners be able to scan the
thin, glossy paper of magazines? Will they have problems with the
books and manuals with the spine removed?

Any advice from people with practical experience on which scanners do
the best at feeding etc. would be appreciated. Here, or in the blog.
--
Support "Canadians for Global Warming"
http://www.templetons.com/brad/cfgw.jpg
From: Timothy Lange on 28 Nov 2007 13:39
Brad,

The fastest way to scan a bunch of documents is actually not a scanner
but a digital camera on a tripod with good lighting and an alignment
chock for the paper/object being scanned.

I've also seen a person setup such a rig with a light box to scan
slides, they did have a 8 megapixel camera with macro focus lense. They
could do over 100 slides in an hour with just as good results as a slide
scanner.

Heck, you can even take it outside and scan your whole house! :-)

Tim Lange
(Go Boilers!)
From: Brad Templeton on 28 Nov 2007 16:52
In article <fikcla$2fc$1(a)mailhub227.itcs.purdue.edu>,
Timothy Lange <tim(a)purdue.edu> wrote:
>Brad,
>
>The fastest way to scan a bunch of documents is actually not a scanner
>but a digital camera on a tripod with good lighting and an alignment
>chock for the paper/object being scanned.
>
>I've also seen a person setup such a rig with a light box to scan
>slides, they did have a 8 megapixel camera with macro focus lense. They
>could do over 100 slides in an hour with just as good results as a slide
>scanner.
>
>Heck, you can even take it outside and scan your whole house! :-)
>
>Tim Lange
>(Go Boilers!)

I would have to differ on that. While a digital camera is fast, for a
good image you need to get the page flat, and even then you won't
match what a scanner does, especially for OCR. For loose papers and
3-D objects, the camera is good. A table with suction holes would work
well for this, and some rigs have that.

However, production scanners can scan both sides of a page, 60 to 90
pages PER MINUTE, ie better than one per second, both sides. A digital
camera can't do that, if you have a clean stack of papers.
--
Analysis blog for Battlestar Galactica Fans -- http://ideas.4brad.com/battlestar
From: Barry Watzman on 28 Nov 2007 22:17
If you really believe that this is a good way to scan documents, your
credibility just went to zero.


Timothy Lange wrote:
> Brad,
>
> The fastest way to scan a bunch of documents is actually not a scanner
> but a digital camera on a tripod with good lighting and an alignment
> chock for the paper/object being scanned.
>
> I've also seen a person setup such a rig with a light box to scan
> slides, they did have a 8 megapixel camera with macro focus lense. They
> could do over 100 slides in an hour with just as good results as a slide
> scanner.
>
> Heck, you can even take it outside and scan your whole house! :-)
>
> Tim Lange
> (Go Boilers!)
From: Rob on 29 Nov 2007 05:12
Barry Watzman wrote:

> If you really believe that this is a good way to scan documents, your
> credibility just went to zero.
>
>

Rubbish.

Well its quick and gives results which are acceptable. Small file size -
I don't use my scanner any more when a digital camera is available.


r



> Timothy Lange wrote:
>
>> Brad,
>>
>> The fastest way to scan a bunch of documents is actually not a scanner
>> but a digital camera on a tripod with good lighting and an alignment
>> chock for the paper/object being scanned.
>>
>> I've also seen a person setup such a rig with a light box to scan
>> slides, they did have a 8 megapixel camera with macro focus lense.
>> They could do over 100 slides in an hour with just as good results as
>> a slide scanner.
>>
>> Heck, you can even take it outside and scan your whole house! :-)
>>
>> Tim Lange
>> (Go Boilers!)
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