Chinese approach

[Antoha-spb]

Browsing through the online fair of Chinese manufacturers found some interesting contactless scanning stuff

From complex digital presenters capable of doing scans of various kinds - to plain and simple digitizing gadgets like this, this, this, this or that



What if to buy two units and fix them looking on the craddle sides instead of using photocameras - looks like it will work and be extremely portable, especially if the V-craddle itself was made foldable. Two 'scanners' occupy 2 USB ports, the third one will feed any USB LED light above the book...

Manufacturers sell them in lots of 10+, and i suppose their cost should be around $25 without shipping, so if this may work and folks here got interest about it - we may 'join the forces'....

What do you think about it?

A.

[daniel_reetz]

Super links, Antoha! I guess the only real question here is the quality of image these devices produce... did you find any samples out there?

[Antoha-spb]

I already requested sample images, quotes and minimum lot volumes from the manufacturers

Will let you know the replies.

[Antoha-spb]

One of the manufacturers replied. They offer 300 units per lot priced at US$99 per A4 scanner and US$199 per A3 version
sample unit +25% to the price

This is a picrure of their 'scanner'



It's capable of making colour scans, but the quality is poor due to insufficient light forcing the firmware to extract maximum available details together with the big portion of noise.



Text doesn't look much better, especially these terrible chromatic aberration on the page edges. The geometry, however, is almost Okay.



So as a 'scanning head' this toy seems to be rather useless...and given its bulk price ($99-$199) - even not fun.

A.

[daniel_reetz]

I don't know how I missed this update- thanks for posting it. These are starting to get marketed to the western world... here's a page that came across my RSS feed today:

http://www.gizmag.com/hovercam-scanner/13981/

[Misty]

I must have missed this, too. Thanks for posting the samples and looking into this, Antona. It's too bad they look unusable, but it was worth checking into. The chromatic aberration is really bad - I'm not surprised their optics are low-quality though. It looks like, given the noise, text isn't really very legible even ignoring the colour reproduction.

Someone else posted the Hovercam earlier, too, Daniel. It's interesting to see these marketed over here. I wonder if this means that the overhead photo-scanner approach is going to become more common.

Along those lines (and sort of off-topic), I've been thinking about using that kind of approach for my scanner. It's becoming increasingly clear that bound material is going to be in the minority of the material I'll be doing in the future, whereas flattish oversized material will be fairly common. To that end, I'd want to look at creating something more similar to the Kirtas Skyview, incorporating a cloth shade like Ann's or the Atiz's, and a single large-size, flat platen. I also want to experiment with a polarizing filter to eliminate glare. Too bad I have another few months to wait until I have any money to really start working on this!

[Antoha-spb]

Dan, Misty,

you didn't miss anything 'cause i just posted these pix as an update of my previous post (...in order not to produce one post after another like speaking with myself in this thread )

Misty, this is what i'm now developing too - a scanning solution for large and flat paper dox. Kirtas thing is good for some kind of oversized material, but 5D + L-optics + soft&even light is beyond an average DIY budget i suppose Purchase and 'upgrade' of a wide format scanner would cost the same if not less. I tried to work with my 400D+good f/2.8 lens and combine shots in PhSh, but results were inferior.

I will make a new topic here (or put a message in existing one) about all my findings once they come to a more or less workable idea. In short, there are three ways of digitizing the wide format - making photos like Kirtas, a contact scan like Contex or Graphtec, or a planetary scan like Zeutschel. Photos are limited in sensor resolution and costly, contact method requires serious rebuild of the scanner hardware and firmware, DIY planetary scanning is mechanically very complicated (...to stabilize the geometry & light). However, nothing of that is rocket science, at least it's worth trying...