Storing Old Books - scanning them

[spuorgelgoog]

Sacrilage. Unless you're prepared to pay for the rebinding.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

Or even reprinting.

What's wrong with a digi camera on a tripod?

I was astounded to get a 1000 picture flash card for less than 10 quid..

[ARWadworth]

That could be worth a go.

Adam

[Steve Firth]

Where did you manage to get a 20Gb flash card for £10?

[Stuart Noble]

Why would you need anything more than 1gb?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I never said it was 20GCB,. It was 1GB. At full res quality the camera (2Mpx) produces 1600x1200 pictures at areound 700K-1Mbyte apiece.

well it was cheap..

actually the camera will do movies apparently..never tried.

There is an argument for lots of picture if say you are on a holiday, and take a load of snaps..sure most will be junk..but I used to get through 5-6 roll films, this is only equivalent to 30..

In the OP's context, putting a book on a table, with lighting, a camera postioned exactly the right distance, and in proper focus, with a cable relase...page-turn-snap-page-turn-snap..would probably allow you to 'scan' the text at least for archicval purposes as fast as any other way.

Not sure how readable MY camera would be, but its only a cheapy. Then something like a half a gig per book storage.

[Stuart Noble]

Don't bother! I have a Canon S2 which produces the princely sum of 8 minutes 640 x 480 video per Gb. High quality but of limited use, apart from having a choice of 30 frames per second to extract as stills.

Hence my suggestion of an old Coolpix 990/995, which lends itself rather well to being clamped to a drill stand or similar.

[AJH]

I used the coolpix 885, the only think missing was a remote shutter release to remove shake. Even though only 3.1MP the lens was good, and a lot better than the 4MP one I was given as a replacement when the lens telescope mechanism pack up.

On one occasion I was able to photograph a whole map sheet, calibrate it on my laptop and load waypoints into my GPS with better than 50 metre accuracy.

The thing would be to take the largest highest quality picture and work back from that. I find large jpeg to small gif acceptable if you don't have raw bitmaps, .png may offer an advantage that I'm unaware of.

AJH

[Clive George]

Self timer helps with that...

cheers, clive

[AJH]

Yes but it introduces a 10s delay for each page, so with 300 pages it's best to snap away.

AJH

[Clive George]

2s here :-)

cheers, clive

[The Natural Philosopher]

If I convert to black and white useing sa decent threshold, and go goif, line drawings work very well in a small space. Trouble is it takes a lot of pre processing to avoid jaggies that don't show on the greysscale..

Storage is cheap..

[Steve Firth]

Oh right, it stores 1000 s**te pictures in low resolution heavily compressed. You should have said.

No use for scanning a book where you would need 150 dpi minimum.

[Steve Firth]

I you think that a heavily compressed image of a page has any use other than for a hobbyist then I suppose 1Gb could just about store 1000 images.

[Andy Dingley]

It's good enough for MIT

(There was a bandsaw involved too)

[Stuart Noble]

And perfectly readable up to A4 IME.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Look, a point here.

This is a Nikon coolpix 775. Not great, but not bad. Its a 2Mpx basic resolution. The images it produces on its FINEST quality settings are around 700Kbytes for 1600x1200 pixels give or take. They are certainly a match for a mid range SLR on 400ASA film.

They are certainly readable for text.

So its obvious that not only is the camera doing significant compression, its also obvious that its doing a pretty fair job at it too.

Compression works because every last pixel need not be recorded..you record the transitions,the edges, and the tonal variations. On a white page with black writing, there is significant scope for compression.

Sure its not as good as a raw bitmap, but if you are trying to record the CONTENT for posterity, its more than good enough.

[Stuart Noble]

I notice the scans of UK census records online are about twice that resolution, but there you often need to decipher ancient handwriting from bad originals.

And on a 28" screen can anyone really tell the difference between DVD and divx at 20% the file size? Newer compression formats are probably even more efficient. Sony's micromv died a death though.