My First Build - Horizontal Single Camera

[gnosis]

Hi everyone and thanks for a great informative forum. I've wanted to scan my books for quite some time but it wasn't until I found this site that I thought it possible on my budget.

My first build is a single camera scanner based on Antoha's single camera build. My requirements were, simple design, cheap and use of my current SLR camera. I liked Antoha's build but thought I could simplify it by laying it on its side. I have scanned a couple of books now and I'm amazed at the quality of the final product. It isn't a perfect design but it fit my requirements just right. The platen is made from glass from a couple of old frames of almost equal size and mounted vertically on an old corner shelf I had laying around. The corner shelf has multiple holes drilled in the bottom diagonally from the back corner to allow different size books to align with camera and swivels on a peg I have on the base. I use clamps to hold the base to the table and they double as stoppers for the platen to align up facing the camera. Lights where a couple of halogen I bought from IKEA for my kid's rooms. The trigger is an old ballpoint pen I have mounted a trigger on and soldered it to an old telephone cable laying around and then to an old flash cable that just happened to fit perfectly into my camera. Total cost for whole project: $2.99 for a trigger switch from Radio Shack.

Thanks everyone,

gnosis

[rob]

Ha ha, $2.99! Anyway, I like your idea to put the whole thing sideways. What do you use to hold the book up against the platen?

[gnosis]

Rob,

I push it towards the platen with my hand. Since I need to swivel the platen between shots I find my hand is on it pretty much all the time anyway. The drawback with my design is that the side(s) of the book with many pages drops down so I have a cardboard shimmy under those pages. You can see that in the photo. I guess it would get deskewed by scan tailor anyway but for some reason I like my originals to be perfectly aligned.

[daniel_reetz]

This is a great design and a great first post, gnosis! Can you share an image from your scanning setup with us?

[gnosis]

Daniel,

Thanks for your compliments

Here is a sample image from a scan. It is scaled down to 800x1200 pixels originals turn out to be somewhere in the 300+ dpi range.