DIY Book Scanner

Single camera? Use a copy stand. Place a piece of plate glass over the page to keep it flat. Position lights off to each side of the page (L/R), pointed downward at the page. The farther away you can position the lights from the page, the more even the lighting will be across the page (or do it outs...

It's unfortunate there aren't images of book pages acquired with this scanner. From the last photo of the display on the back of one of the cameras, I can see lots of reflections from the frame on the platen glass. The light is producing a strong hotspot on the upper right corner of the platen glass...

Adding my two cents to this thread... Looking at your original images (the first two in this thread), the lighting is a bit uneven. It's not as bad as what you typically see from a single-light V cradle scanner, but there's a noticeable difference between the right and left side of the white backgro...

You might also want to post your question here: MobileRead PDF forum

Yes, the DPI will be dependent upon your screen resolution, but I'd wager that the OCR accuracy will approach 100% even with the lower DPI because of the "cleanliness" of the image. If it doesn't, you could incrementally increase the size of the text prior to the screen capture and see how...

Can't comment on that particular camera but I use a pair of Canon DSLRs in one of my scanners and they cost about the same amount. Being able to use better lenses is a big advantage over the smaller, less expensive point-n-shoot cameras. You don't get blurred edges on the text as you move farther aw...

I am posting here so that a reputable company can be named, one with which the membership here has direct experience. As you know, this site deals mainly with DIY book scanners and as such the majority the participants in the forums haven't had the direct experience you are looking for. You might t...

This scanner design might make it easier for you to flatten the page if you're going to press a black colored metal plate against the backside of the page. I built a scanner like this years ago and had some success with it. The downside was having to scan all of the odd pages, then all of the even ...

Yeah, smartphone would be the way to go. I recently bought an iScan battery-powered handheld wand-type scanner for a project I was working on (scanning the labels on prescription pill bottles). It was only $50 but works pretty well on flat pages and can scan at 900 DPI. That being said, I don't see ...

Just to verify, you've tried scanning a dark page (ideally, a solid black piece of slick paper) with this scanner in a completely darkened room and you don't see any artifacts? That is, are you certain that the artifacts in your scanner's images are coming from external light sources? I'm not famili...