Would you care to recommend to me a flatbed USB scanner? I have two wishes: 1) it works well with books, and 2) whatever software you use is simple and straightforward.
Books are hard to fit and hold flat on many scanners, and flimsy ones feel like they are going to break when you lean on the spine to flatten the pages. It’d be good to have the scanning area close to an edge, to be able to get the lid up and out of the way, and to have a heavy glass pane. An extra large imaging area would also allow fitting more books in a neat flat way.
Scanners I have used seem to have weird and obscure software. I want to choose between several resolution options (and be able to figure out what is the native resolution and not choose anything interpolated upward). I want to know how many bits greyscale or color or B/W clearly. I like to select an area in preview and then scan it at full detail. And I don’t want to do any of my touchup, cropping, brightness/contrast or other kinds of work on the scanner software; I already have excellent software for that. But software I have used often seems to do many things automatically that I can’t see or change! I hate that!
So, you know anything that you think would suit these needs? Thanks!!!
As far as scanning books goes, the only good way to scan most is to take them to pieces. You simply cannot get good coverage near the binding; if the pages lift up even 1/16" they will be out of the focal plane enough that you won’t get a good image. I recently took apart a 1940’s-era technical book that had a very supple stitched binding, because even with the fabric binding I still could not get a good enough scan for OCR near the binding margin. Most modern book spines are glued, and they are not nearly as flexible. So if you really want to digitize a book without destroying it, you need to lay a piece of glass over the target page, hold the other page out of the way and then photograph the book page-by-page with a high-end digital camera.
. . . .
(before anyone begins moping, do note: the 1940’s era book I took apart is old but not particularly wanted–I bought it for $3.27 + $3.00 shipping on ebay)
As far as scanners themselves go, most home-use scanners now have a “simple” mode that tries to do things automatically, and an “advanced” mode that allows you to to everything manually. I have a Canoscan LiDE 30 that allows manual settings. …When my late-great Umax Astra 3000 parallel-port scanner died, I looked around online to try to find another replacement that allowed the manual settings it did, and I really couldn’t find ANY detailed info about home-scanner driver features online.
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Well, for example, I have used a Canon “lide” something (sp?) and an HP (I think it was a “scanjet”). Neither is mine.
In both cases, even though I hunted around through the software interface, I could not find out what was the native resolution of the scanner. So I don’t know what of the several resolution options are “straight”, or what were 2:1, 3:1 and so forth, and what would have been making a bigger file out of a smaller one with no new information.
In the case of the Canon software, it took a long time to figure out how to tell how many bits were scanned. I could easily see where to make it color versus not color. There were “color” and “black and white” and “greyscale” options, though it was hard to figure out how to adjust how many bits of greyscale (and usually there were many options that were greyed out though I don’t know why). For the black and white, of course it is very important where the threshold is between black and white, and since I could not find out where to set that I had to use greyscale instead and change this in other software later when things came out wrong. Finally, there were several more options after color, greyscale and B/W, and I still have no idea what they mean.
And in all cases there were entire categories of software functions that looked complicated that I didn’t even try to learn. I just don’t think there should be that many choices!
I’ve actually built some digital imaging systems from scratch, and it boggles my mind that it’s this hard for me to make sense of their software.
Hey, the book scanner looks like it does it right. That would be nice. Though, it’s 2-4X the price of the others, and I never heard of the brand. Also, the web site it’s on seems to have a bunch of nutty information on it, for example “They use a technology called a photomultiplier tube (PMT). In PMT, the document to be scanned is mounted on a glass cylinder.” (a PMT, of course, is the light sensor, not a document mounting means).
So in reading reviews of scanners, I see the following about the Epson 2400:
“The product info says it will scan medium format film, but the lousy software will only recognize up to a 4.5x6 cm negative/transparancy. Sice I use 6x7 cm format, this scanner is useless for this purpose. So far, I haven’t been able to ‘trick’ the software into scanning a complete 6x7, nor have I had any luck using Photoshop to do this with this scanner. It would be so much better if Epson would just let the user select the area to be scanned, like HP does.”
Now, this is the sort of thing I am afraid I will find out only after buying - the scanner automatically decides what area to scan, and you can’t change its choice? This is the kind of bizarre flaw that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask about. And I was warming to the idea of an Epson based on low rate of software problems in other reviews…