MCS 500 scanner ???

[goldo]

Hello.

I was interested recently to book scanners. I have many books of philosophy, science, etc.. I wish I could quickly scan my books in order to read pdf on an e-pad. And also to offer those pdf's to others people.

I see many diy book scanners model . But I am quite unable to tinker, to build things. The simplest solutions (with cardboards) can not quickly scan (the book moves, it must carefully reposition, replace the glass) and do not always give good results.

But I just saw a new model of scanner that is inexpensive and seems to practice: the scanner Mustec MCS 500 PRO A3:

http://www.pixmania-pro.com/ee/et/09817 ... anner.html

demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DKmLgPZoLs

what do you think about it ? do you think we can use as the basis for scanning books? even if we must make some changes ?

if you do not use glass to flatten the pages, are there any program to erase shadows toward the center of the book, correct the curvature and straighten the alignment of text (eg because the book was not perfectly straight) ?

I think to use this scanner with a flat glass. It should scan one page at a time. So that, there would'nt have curvature and shadow problems.

Or scan two pages at once. But then it would push heavily on the glass for not too large curvature in the center of the book.

We could also use a V-shaped glass and 2 devices (one on each side) but it would be more costly and complicated. The advantage is that everything is connected directly to the pc.

What do you think about ?

Thank you

Best regards,
Karl

[Andreas_R]

Hi,

I was intereested in the MCS 500, so I ordered one. Got it yesterday, and will send it back today.

The quality is just not good for scanning books. Ok you could scan a book and you could OCR it, but because of the quality of the images, you wil have to correct a lot.

For other scanns the MCS 500 could be ok. The software is a bit old (Windows 95 style like dialogs). But it is very easy to use.

I do not have the rights to publish the text of the pages, so I deleted most of the text, but you can see the result anyway, I think. May it would be possible to get a better result if you use a sheet of glas to push the book down. I did not try that, the only glas I had was already placed in my book scanner, I did not want to disasemble it.