Canon Considering Withdrawing from Compact Camera market

[joseph73]

The big changes, color to b&w, or large contrast changes are where you begin to lose data. Sharpening, noise reduction, rotating, etc not as big a deal.
For the lens distortion, I use a program to batch process it on the computer and sharpen. It works great. You can also use photoshop with an action if that is a program you have.
The lens correction, dewarping, or other things, I wouldn't worry about image quality.

My big issue is science or technical books. Reproducing fine diagrams, schematics or math symbols is an issue. With text you can guess the characters if need be. Not so with this stuff.
That's when I need all the resolution I can muster. We're talking about micro text for subscripts and superscripts or other things. They tend to be printed on a glossy page or very thin paper making it tough to capture.

[fadedsoulz]

An idea would be to buy the replacement camera modules for the Lumia 1020 and find a way to interface them! It can be done, it's just difficult since there is little documentation. I've heard someone was able to do it with another module since they used standardized connectors. However, it would be difficult getting the module to interface with the other hardware along with the driver stuff.

[dtic]

In a year or two newer generations of the raspi camera board or similar tools will probably be at least as good as todays compacts.

[vitorio]

In fact, I am shopping for a Nokia 1020 right now to do some image quality comparisons with one.

I just pulled the trigger on a used one on eBay. There are units as low as $200 on there, with bad ESNs (can't use them on a US cell network, because they weren't paid off or were reported lost/stolen) and shattered glass, but that doesn't matter in a wifi/USB camera-only usage situation like a book scanner. The latest OS updates support a native RAW format. The camera grip gives it a tripod mount and a dedicated shutter button (for mechanical triggering), and the third-party CameraPro app lets you fix the focus or use wifi/bluetooth remote triggers.

You can also still get new Nokia 808 phones (the previous, Symbian OS model) on Amazon for under $350. CameraPro has a Symbian version that supports using a cellphone headset as a remote trigger, in addition to wifi/bluetooth.

An idea would be to buy the replacement camera modules for the Lumia 1020 and find a way to interface them!

Replacement camera modules run ~$150-180. It's not much more expensive to just buy a half-broken phone, and then you don't have to do any hardware interfacing. Although, in theory, the Raspberry Pi could interface with the 808/1020's sensor.