Currently I am using a specialized Plustek bookscanner and scanning in at 600 DPI for BW and 300 DPI for Color. Been doing this for 4 year and wore out a scanner already and on second one, will probably need a 3rd one soon. (I hire someone to scan in my personal library 6 days/week.)spamsickle wrote:Unless you are scanning newspapers or something similarly large I would question the value of a 20 MP camera for this application. A standard-sized book can be more than adequately captured with an 8 MP or 10 MP camera. Beyond that, you're increasing your processing time and storage requirements without significantly increasing the quality of the final product. Even small type (superscripts in footnotes, for instance) can be easily resolved in a 12 MP image.Shyamasundara wrote:I already have 2 Canons so I will try CHDK, but for me it was not so much the price point but the higher resolution 20 MP compared to 16 MP which give you much better images to start with. Will still go to the Nikon showroom to see what they have to offer.
I can definitely notice a difference between an image that is scanned at 300 DPI and 600 DPI even after applying Adobe "clear scan." A page scanned in at 600 DPI and then "clear scanned" is just better and easier on the eyes. And since I am the one who is going to be reading the texts (and I have several thousand PDFs documents) I want the best images so that I don't stress my aging eyes anymore than necessary.
I currently have a 12 MP and 14 MP Canon and will experiment with them and see what kind of out put they generate. But I notice when looking at an image of a sheet of paper taken with the 14 mp that it only had a resolution of 180 pixels/inch. To me that seems pretty low.
But I am willing to experiment and see what kind of final product I get.
As for the price, the Nikon 20 MP are about $90-$110/each, very affordable for a camera that would just be used for scanning.
Anyway, this is all hypothetical and can only be decided after I actually do some experimentation. My main concern is to get the highest resolution image possible for feeding to Adobe "clear scan." It makes a difference to my eyes as I read these documents for hours at a time daily. Not just a little light reading now and then.