Light Wedge-style lighting?

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bobtiki
Posts: 2
Joined: 21 Mar 2013, 17:56
E-book readers owned: iPad (with Kindle, iBooks, GoodReader apps)
Number of books owned: 600
Country: USA
Location: Seattle, Washington
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Light Wedge-style lighting?

Post by bobtiki »

I'm getting serious about building a book scanner as a summer project, and I've been thinking about page illumination, and wanted to check with you guys before I went too far down this road...

Having once had a Light Wedge book "nightlight":

http://www.coolthings.com/lightwedge-ma ... -a-tablet/

…that made me wonder if anyone has tried illuminating the page with Light Wedge-style LED strip side-lights, instead of an overhead light? I'm thinking if there are enough evenly-spaced LEDs all around the edge of an acrylic platen, I could get pretty even lighting this way, without having to worry about polarizing filters, falloff, and light-vs-camera angles.

But this is just speculation at this point. Good idea? Terrible idea? Anyone tried it yet? (I searched the board, and didn't find it, if so.)
rkomar
Posts: 98
Joined: 12 May 2013, 16:36
E-book readers owned: PRS-505, PocketBook 902, PRS-T1, PocketBook 623, PocketBook 840
Number of books owned: 3000
Country: Canada

Re: Light Wedge-style lighting?

Post by rkomar »

The camera is much more sensitive to light intensity than the human eye is. So, the light across the page may look fine to your eye, but the photo might be darker on one side than the other. If you have one of these light wedges and a digital camera, I would suggest taking a picture of a lighted page by hand and seeing if it looks okay before going ahead with a scanner design based on this light.
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