Scanners, please tell us about your scanner

[tilliban]

You can try photographing books.
I will next month.
A collector lets me have a shot at his horror books.
Main problem is the surface distortion (how do you say?) --- bended pages.
You can minimize that by lying one page flat and supporting the other with something stuck under it to support...
Hafta see it to believe it.
Look, like this:

[The Rabble]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2543l4p7nTc
http://www.redferret.net/?p=22459
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-Trash-and-Cheap-C/


If you do a search on something like "home made book scanner" you'll come of with a plethora of ideas. What I'm going to do.
The "cheap" commercial ones are enough for me to buy a life time supply of '5 fer a buck' comics from the local shop.

[John C]

From the reading I did a while back on DIY scanners, my understanding is that the key is good lighting.  Everything else is comfort, like holding the book open at an angle facing two cameras.  You could probably get away with just a tripod and a glass plate, if the light is strong and diffuse.

It probably won't solve the problem of bad stapling, though, bear in mind.  Anywhere you'd have trouble holding the comic down on a plate, you'll probably also have keeping the page smooth.

I keep wanting to rig something like this up, myself (I probably don't have many comics that aren't already scanned, if any, but I have plenty of books taking up space that I wouldn't mind having access to on the road), so I'm interested in how it goes.

[Yoc]

I think it's CBpop who is making his own scanner apparatus as well.

[bminor]

I used to use a large graphic arts camera for shooting flat art for printing, which is by pure coincidence what we are trying to do with comics!

What those cameras have are the following:

1. Artwork held down by glass, sometimes in a vacuum frame
2. Lights at a 45 degree angle.
3. Photographed in a dark room, I believe this helps with any reflections or glare that you may have on the glass. Unwanted glare is a major problem.
4. What I would add to this kind of setup is a good polarizing filter to the camera being used. This will also help eliminate any unwanted glare.

I think if you made a nice setup like this it would work very, very well. A 32 page comic could be shot in just a few minutes.

Any thoughts on this?

[John C]

I don't know optics as well as I probably should, but I wonder if the polarizing filter might be either overkill or potentially counterproductive, depending on the kind of lighting (I very vaguely remember reading that some LED lights are strongly polarized, but I can't recall where I heard it, so that may well be wrong).  A diffuser for the light source (on a dimmer) might solve the same problem in a more global way.

The trick the DIYers seem to use is to have a v-shaped glass rig to insert between the pages at a right angle.  That keeps the overhead light at 45 degrees and keeps both pages available to be shot.

The dark room is a really good (obvious now that someone's said it) point.