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PC hardware forum: Top scanner for books and magazines?

by: emkj April 8, 2011 6:51 PM PDT

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Top scanner for books and magazines?

by emkj - 4/8/11 6:51 PM

I'm looking for a good scanner to convert my library of certain books and magazines into OCR'd PDFs, so something that can run b&w or grayscale text images quickly, has a frame that's flush to glass plate, a lid that's easy to get out of the way for thick books, and maybe an bigger than 8.5"x11" scan area would be ideal.

Up until now I've been using an Epson Perfection 1240U, which has a 8.75"x12" scan area, but is slow and noisy to run continuously. Plus the underside of the glass is in pretty bad shape. (I don't want to risk taking it apart to clean it until I have another scanner to take it's place.)

So, if anyone here has had good experiences with a particular scanner doing this kind of work, I'd love to hear your recommendations!


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Sounds like a lot of work and I'd think that

by Steven Haninger - 4/9/11 10:45 AM

In Reply to: Top scanner for books and magazines? by emkj

unless you can automate or outsource the task, you won't save that much time with a faster scanner. It's going to be the time it takes to set up each page that's going to kill you. PDF and OCR conversion isn't exactly instantaneous either so saving a second or two on the mechanical scanning process isn't going to save you that much per page. I've an Epson V600 and have done a few document scans as well as some book pages. The books are tough because of the curvature near the spine but, with some time and effort, you can manually correct much of that in software. You didn't mention a page estimate but I can't imagine a flatbed scanner being used to convert books and magazines to electronic documents. Perhaps, if you could still find some of the books, you could buy extras and separate the pages from the binder. In that way you could use some sort of document feeder but it will still be slow going. Good luck.


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