DIY Book Scanner

I am working on a re-print for a very old book with a lot of images.

What is the best way to get a small file size (under 400K) but still have at least 300 DPI quality images.

There has to be a balancing point between size and quality.

Anyone have any experience on this subject?

Thanks

Unless you lose some information, there is no way to compress an image to that size without sacrificing quality. If there was a way nobody would be using JPEG anymore.

If you use pdfbeads, add -r 200 to lower the DPI of the images. There really isn't anything else you can do aside from decreasing the number of colors or decreasing the DPI.

I second that...

- reduce number of colors (bitonal images will give you the lowest file size)
- use lossy compression, adapted to your image type

Depending on the support you want to read this file on, you should also consider using DJVU encoding, it gives much smaller files for the same image quality