Best camera settings for Canon A2200?

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cstan
Posts: 2
Joined: 15 May 2014, 08:02
E-book readers owned: 3
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

Best camera settings for Canon A2200?

Post by cstan »

Hola amigos,

I recently purchased a hackerspace kit from Daniel (the one on the home page of diybookscanner.org) and two Canon A2200 cameras, and I have installed chdk on them, although I am still in the learning curve on scripting, etc. This will take a little time to master, but in the meantime I would just like to capture a few book chapters in a manual manner (which is still better than using a standard scanner!), and I'm finding it a little difficult to determine what folks are using as their camera settings.

All of my images are text only, and I'm looking for the optimum setting that will give me crisp text on a white background. Instead of confusing the thread with all the stuff I tried and didn't work, could anyone specifically recommend:
B&W or color
shutter speed (Tv):
ISO:
JPG or TIFF:
Anything else? (The A2200 does not have an aperture setting)

The main thing is to get an image that I do not have to adjust contrast and brightness on in an image editor.

I have been using Photoshop to crop and rotate pages and Adobe 9 to OCR them, but I think I am about to switch to ABBYY FineReader, as I haven't quite figured out how to get Adobe to optimize these files to text-only and reduce the file size without losing image quality.

Thanks for the help,
cstan
dtic
Posts: 464
Joined: 06 Mar 2010, 18:03

Re: Best camera settings for Canon A2200?

Post by dtic »

Hi cstan.

Before I get to the camera settings, check out the program Scan Tailor for preprocessing. You input book page photos and Scan Tailor rotates, deskews, crops and then outputs black and white tif images. Next you convert the tif files to pdf with Acrobat or some other pdf maker. Adding preprocessing makes a big difference.

I don't have A2200's but with other Canon compacts I've used color mode, lowest ISO mode, jpg and then a light setting in the camera that fits well with the particular light source you have. If you have LED lighting try "tungsten" or "flourescent".

In Acrobat try out the Clear Scan OCR setting.
cstan
Posts: 2
Joined: 15 May 2014, 08:02
E-book readers owned: 3
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

Re: Best camera settings for Canon A2200?

Post by cstan »

Hey, thanks for the tips. The "clear scan" option in Adobe is much better, but still not what I am hoping for. Will play around with it a bit.

I suppose I hadn't tried Scan Tailor because I read it was unsupported. But a lot of people seem to be using it, so I will give it a spin.

Will keep you posted. Thanks again!
duerig
Posts: 388
Joined: 01 Jun 2014, 17:04
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States of America

Re: Best camera settings for Canon A2200?

Post by duerig »

My preferred A2200 settings:

Color,
White balance: Tungsten (I have halogen lights)
Shutter speed: 1/500 or 1/750 (This compensates for the bright lights and reduces the possible glare from outside light)
ISO: 80
FIle type: JPG
Zoom level: 4 (zoom in as much as you can for high DPI)

I've been using the spreads and now spreadpi workflow which captures the pictures from both cameras to my controller, automatically rotates them, renames the images, and puts them in sequence. After that, I send them through Scan Tailor. Thus far, I haven't tried OCR. I just convert the compressed pictures produced by Scan Tailor directly into a pdf.
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