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Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi

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Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi

#4

Post by mseebach »

It seems a modern camera-phone (my Samsung S4, and the S4 before it, takes crystal clear photos of text) and some clever mounting could easily replace the hardware setup: The software seems to be the interesting component here -- does it or something like it exist alone?

Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi

#5

Post by sireat »

Interesting product, but not really much of an improvement in speed if you have to do the page turns yourself.

The foot pedal for scanning saves a tiny bit of time, but it is still cumbersome to scan a whole book.

Also strange to emphasize MIPS CPU which should not be better than your average cheap smartphone ARM.

So, you are saving some time over regular scanner(been there done that), but it is still not practical for say 100 books.

If they had figured out a clever way to do the page turns this would have been a winner.

Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi

#7

Post by baldfat »

I built my own Digital Library in 2006-2008 for Graduate School. It was very handy and I could have the books read to me in PDF while driving and search the text for research. Took about 30 minutes per hundred pages and I did it for HOURS. In Theology (Historical was my specific discipline) it was common for each class to be from 3,000 pages to 12,000 of reading (Yes a thousand pages a week basically for one class) I had to pick and choice which text was necessary and historically many of the books were public domain and I could download and grep them.

I would have cut off my left hand for this device. I bought a book scanner for this and it was worth it to me. The OCR was fairly weak but it was okay at the time.

Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi

#8

Post by SeanDav »

For a far more impressive scanner, developed by a Google engineer and including automated page turning see: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scan...

I believe there is a far more detailed breakdown of the project floating around somewhere.

It is possible, but not clear to me, that Google use this for their own book scanning project - Google Books.

Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi

#9

Post by noir_lord »

I write all my design notes, sketches etc on 5mm A4 square pads, this would be an incredible devices for me since I could scan them in really quickly once I'm done with them and I'd have a permanent record of all my stuff without a massive pile of pads to shlep through.

Could also attach metadata to them (project name etc).

I considered building something like this a while back as a side project but couldn't find a high enough resolution camera I could connect to a raspberry pi, this is 16MP, the rpi camera is only 5MP so that was a problem.

Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi

#10

Post by oDot »

SeanDav wrote: post #8

For a far more impressive scanner, developed by a Google engineer and including automated page turning see: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scan... I believe there is a far more detailed breakdown of the project floating around somewhere. It is possible, but not clear to me, that Google use this for their own book scanning project - Google Books.

Jason Scott says it destroys books:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4695

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