Options for remote triggering Canon DSLRs & Powershots

[cgott4242]

That's pretty cool. If it does work with multiple cameras, I'm pretty sure that I'll eventually scrap the digital compact cameras I'm currently toying with and pick up a pair of T2i Canons (EOS 550D) for my scanner. So many of the problems that we face when using the cheaper compact cameras for document scanning no longer exist once you move up to a DSLR. Gotta crack open the wallet though.

Just starting this project.
Can you elaborate on some of the problems with using a compact digital camera. Also I was thinking of going with a canon G10 - would that also have these issues (and if so I should go with a DSLR)?

thx

[markvdb]

That's pretty cool. If it does work with multiple cameras, I'm pretty sure that I'll eventually scrap the digital compact cameras I'm currently toying with and pick up a pair of T2i Canons (EOS 550D) for my scanner. So many of the problems that we face when using the cheaper compact cameras for document scanning no longer exist once you move up to a DSLR. Gotta crack open the wallet though.

Just starting this project.
Can you elaborate on some of the problems with using a compact digital camera. Also I was thinking of going with a canon G10 - would that also have these issues (and if so I should go with a DSLR)?

thx

The easy way is to use the cheapest in the Canon EOS series you can find. These support remote capture in firmware and are also directly usable with gphoto. Not cheap though.

The other option I have seen you are trying to get to is the Canon A2200 with chdk and ptp. As you've read on the forums, I've been nagging the CHDK people for a stable release, and a lot of stuff is moving there. Expect to see a walkthrough for using your A2200 with 1.00D firmware from me soon.

[cgott4242]

thanks,( I also have 2 Canon SD1100 IS (8MP))

Here are the options w/in my budget. Let me know which you think is best (in no order) - i.e. is it worth the add'l money
(a) Dual Canon Rebel XTi 10MP DSLR - $500 (total)
(b) Dual Canon Powershot G7 10MP -$220
(c) Dual G10 14MP- $400
(d) Dual A2200 14MP - $120

Options as I see them
(a) w/A2200 + CHDK + $30 USB trigger I can remotely trigger both camera, and I can connect each video out to a USB capture card + $30 on the PC for liveview, the question is transferring files. Currently my wifi doesn't work with the CHDK - is that supposed to be that way? Being that the USB is connected to the trigger, I'd have to stop work flow to clear the SD card - what am I missing.
(b) w/rest of cameras - buy breezesys s/w =+$230, but seems to do everything and saves files directly to PC

Of course I'd rather go the A2200 route for a total cost of $180. But I have a ton of important books I want to scan and OCR and I don't want to have to rescan. Let me know what you think?

Also does savign in RAW format make a big impact on OCR?

thx

[cgott4242]

The easy way is to use the cheapest in the Canon EOS series you can find. These support remote capture in firmware and are also directly usable with gphoto. Not cheap though.

The other option I have seen you are trying to get to is the Canon A2200 with chdk and ptp. As you've read on the forums, I've been nagging the CHDK people for a stable release, and a lot of stuff is moving there. Expect to see a walkthrough for using your A2200 with 1.00D firmware from me soon.

I'm testing with a canon DSLR, are there keyboard shortcuts to control the shutter release button in the EOS Utility (Windows version)?
Or if I buy 2 remote controls - are they generic so that all remote signals are the same (ala TV remotes) where if I click the button on the remote, both cameras will snap the pictures?

[KiwiScanner2]

I upgraded my S5IS's to two G10s in the end to get the desired DPI on some of the documents i'm working on

It works great - I have the shutter release set to work off a right mouse click and have a tiny wireless laptop mouse held in my hand - the intention is to hack this mouse into a button mounted on the handle.

Works great - the main pain is that occasionally breezsys swaps what camera's file gets saved first and throws everything out of order. Pretty easy to keep an eye on it though using the liveviewfinder. When it swaps doing a preview picture sets it straight again

[wms]

KiwiScanner2,

I'm very interested in your workflow: it sounds like it has great potential.

Many of the capture methods described on this board seem excellent at capturing lots of pages, but very cumbersome when it comes to converting them to usable pdf documents.

The Breeze multi-camera software sounds like it could skip several steps in that process, not least by bypassing storing on the sdio card and putting the pages directly onto the hard drive.

If all the images from both cameras can go into a single folder, already named and sorted in page number order, that could save tons of time. Do you have a workflow that comes close to that goal?

Thanks,
WMS

[markvdb]

KiwiScanner2,

I'm very interested in your workflow: it sounds like it has great potential.

Many of the capture methods described on this board seem excellent at capturing lots of pages, but very cumbersome when it comes to converting them to usable pdf documents.

The Breeze multi-camera software sounds like it could skip several steps in that process, not least by bypassing storing on the sdio card and putting the pages directly onto the hard drive.

If all the images from both cameras can go into a single folder, already named and sorted in page number order, that could save tons of time. Do you have a workflow that comes close to that goal?

Thanks,
WMS

https://github.com/markvdb/diybookscann ... eypedal.sh more or less does this. It is meant for Ubuntu 12.04. I'll post a video of it running later.

[Vidar]

The Breeze multi-camera software sounds like it could skip several steps in that process, not least by bypassing storing on the sdio card and putting the pages directly onto the hard drive.

WMS

I prefer to use the single-cam program connected to two different laptops. You don't get two viewfinders side-by-side with the multi-cam version.You get only one, but can change to the other via a drop-down box. The multi-cam version also completely lack the very useful auto-crop feature. That's the feature that makes me use PSRemote and not Canon's own Remote Capture program. It's saves much work. But the remote capture options of both versions doesn't seem to have been updated for many years. All updates refers to the Photo Both feature. Even in the single-cam version you can only adjust the crop rectangle when the viewfinder is at 100%, and thats pretty small on a modern screen. And it would be better if the live viewfinder coluld be enlarged with smaller increments, like 120%..150%, rater than 200 and 400%

If all the images from both cameras can go into a single folder, already named and sorted in page number order, that could save tons of time. Do you have a workflow that comes close to that goal?

WMS

I think this could be a large problem if you happen to miss a page or take a page twice, which I frequently do. I prefer to collect pictures in right and left folders on my desktop. I then use IrfanView to rename them 1,3,5, 7 etc and the others 2, 4, 6, 8 etch and send them to a shared folder. It's then pretty easy to check if I have done any such mistakes. It's where the page orders gets messed up. It's a bother of course, but not really a big deal to fix. After identifying where a page is missing, I take that picture, tranfer it to the desktop with a memory stick, rename it with a letter at the end so it fits in where it belong in the right or left folder and then redo the IrfanView renaming job for that folder (keeping the 'overwrite existing files' option ticked). I need to redo this for every error. It takes a few minutes, but obviously needs to be done.

[dpc]

I've been toying around with the Canon EOS SDK lately. I recently bought another T2i DSLR refurb from Canon (w/18-55 zoom for <$500), so now I have two of them to play with. In less than an hour I was able to enumerate both cameras on the laptop's USB ports and retrieve their device info. This weekend I plan to add the ability to trigger the shutter so that I can set the cameras up manually and then hit a key on my laptop to take photos from both cameras and transfer the jpeg to my laptop.

The SDK enables copying the captured image from the camera's internal buffer to the host PC, and/or storing it on the SD card, so it wouldn't be a big deal to write the images to a single directory on the PC and rename the files on the fly (odd/even from different cameras). I don't know if there's a way to specify a 90 deg. rotation at this stage, but a daemon running on the host PC could easily do this as new files show up in the directory. For that matter, the cameras could just copy to a "left" and "right" subdir respectively and the daemon could perform the odd/even file renaming as well.

I'm wondering if this renaming and rotation really speeds up the work flow significantly though? What I'd eventually like to do is have the image processing working in tandem with the scan, so that when a new file is added to the PC, it can be rotated, deskewed, etc. instead of having to wait until the book is completely scanned. I'm using ST at the moment and for some parts of the process it needs access to all of the images to determine the final page/image size. Maybe if there was some way to tell it what the resulting image size should be for all the pages up front, it wouldn't need all the images before it could begin some of its processing? To be honest, I haven't been following what's been going on in the ST forums so perhaps this is already available in the command line interface.

[markvdb]

https://github.com/markvdb/diybookscann ... eypedal.sh more or less does this. It is meant for Ubuntu 12.04. I'll post a video of it running later.