I'm searching a nice book scanner for digitalize several books which has been discountinued and put them available again in digital format. Commercial scanners, like Atiz ones, aren't an options because they are very (very) expensive. The DIY Book Scanner Kit seems the best option to me as it's easy to setup/use and relatively cheap. I'm new to book scanning and I have some doubts about what cameras to use.
It seems that the full DIY Book Scanner Kit comes with two 16Mpx cameras (Canon A2500??) and CHDK firmware preloaded on two sd cards. I think this will be fine to do the job, but as I have a quite nice budget for the rig (around 1600$) I want to consider other options to make the job easier and faster.
I will be OCR'ing the books through a Abby Fine Reader so it could be awesome to get the images at best quality in order to avoid most OCR errors as possible.
I was thinking in a pair of DLSR cameras for the scanner. Reasons for this are:
Pros:
- Better image quality (better optics, sensor, more megapixels)
- Native support for remote triggering, downloading to computer, preview...
- Faster shooting (?)
- Not have to deal with CHDK and possible issues here
- Way more expensive
- More weight and size (I don't know if DIY chassis was thinked for this kind of setup)
As the scanner will be used for a business work, I would like to reduce the chances of something stop working or not work properly. There's no problem in make some extra job (manual zooming the cameras before start scanning, adjusting the photo parameters, download photos to computer, etc), but things need to work fine.
As I said, book scanning is new to me, so if you could give me some advice or tell me your experience with this matter I will be very thankful.