The future of scanning

[Poztron]

A friend turned me on to this 30-minute video on Youtube that shows a prototype of an automated book scanner that delivers high quality scans and doesn't destroy the original book. In DIY fashion this can apparently be assembled for $1500, but one can easily see where if these were produced in volume, the price would drop considerably. I found it fascinating.  It might require consider customizing to work for comics, but it's not hard to imagine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4JuoOaL11bw

Scanners, check it out.

Meanwhile, back in the present circumstances, we are grateful for all our hard-working scanners who do so much manually and painstakingly.

[Yoc]

Thanks P, interesting stuff!

[Geo (RIP)]

That was very interesting concept there.
I'm wondering how it would work with
some of the comics that the pages are
very brittle, also tears on the pages.

Geo

[Poztron]

You are right, Geo, that such a scanner could be a problem with old brittle newsprint. For delicate publications (such as old GA comics) it probably would not be a good route.

[narfstar]

cool though

[John C]

As a quick update to the DIY camera-based scanners, I spotted this in my RSS feed last night:

http://questioncopyright.com/qco-bl-beta-basic.html

They have other "models," but they're just donations to the organization.  If you haven't heard of it, Question Copyright is Nina Paley's anti-copyright advocacy group (more or less) that she started after having trouble releasing her Sita Sings the Blues animated feature due to not understanding copyright terms.  They're a little too negative for my tastes, but occasionally worth a look for things like this.