DIY Book Scanner

The solution to reflections off the platen glass showing up in your scanned images is a well known scanner design issue involving the platen angle and the location of the camera(s) and scanner's light source. To eliminate the reflection off the adjacent platen glass you need to increase the angle be...

One of them I can set to the high resolution mode. The other one I can't.

Press 'FUNC SET' and then set the camera to PROGRAM (P) mode. You should be able to set the image resolution after making that change.

Unfortunately the Canon Elph 160 doesn't support Live View through that connector. It will only output video over the A/V cable connection when the camera is in PLAYBACK mode and not SHOOT mode. I believe that my Canon DSLRs will happily do this though. They actually have mini-HDMI connectors so it ...

There are other folks that post on this site that would know more about what it would take to capture a live preview from a point-and-shoot camera like the Elph 160 and retrieve that image over a USB connection to a PC. I'm guessing it would involve using a PTP protocol extension via CHDK and LibUSB...

Press the 'FUNC' button, not the 'MENU' button on the back of the camera, then you'll see an option to change the image resolution. I had actually had this particular camera set to 'W' which is less than the 'L' 20 megapixel size. I was playing around with this a while back as the 'W' setting's aspe...

Another data point for you, Bill. I have a Canon Elph 160 here and I took a photo of a page from a random paperback here and the resulting 5152x2896 pixel JPG image file was 5.33MB in size. This camera doesn't have CHDK installed so perhaps that has something to do with what you're seeing? elph160.p...

OK, well thanks for trying. You might be able to upload your large images to one of the free image hosting sites out there and post a link here. You have to be wary of compression artifacts though. Some of these sites will allow large image files to be uploaded but they will compress your file to to...

Wow. Interesting results. It still would be worthwhile to see the image files directly from the two cameras to try to figure out why there was such a big difference in the final two files you've posted. Do you have the original page images available? The OCR'ed results are so dissimilar that if I di...

My mistake. I thought it based the subrect from the edge of the page and not the edge of the image. Still could be helpful for a number of scanner designs that contain the page to the same area of the platen (i.e. camera frame) across the scan. It doesn't work for situations such as Bill's scanner, ...

I think you only need to define the subrect of a page that contains the page number once. After you've done that the program assumes the page number is in the same location relative to the edge of the page on subsequent pages. At least I hope that's the case. The program that I wrote that controls m...