DIY Book Scanner

I consider $400 very expensive for something like this. You would get much better results if someone made a kit, consisting of a stand and combined camera mount/light, and then a used DSLR from eBay (or a decent smartphone). And at a fraction of the price. The software makes the whole package worse,...

For that use case where you are okay with the old paper colour, mismatched between pages, and foregoing machine readability, these scanners are okay. You say you flattened the pages, although there is still some curvature visible. If the software was better it would be able to use horizontal lines o...

I have experimented with the settings. It's impossible to get good results. By "good" I mean with shading intact, readable, not too warped, white paper and reasonably dark text. The frustrating thing is that it could be good. A stand to hold the book open at 90 degrees, and simpler but bet...

Do you have any examples you could share with shaded diagrams, or text near margins? We will need a photo of the original for comparison. Maybe if you only want a "good enough" readable text Czur is okay, but a lot of people want to use them for creating archival copies of rare documentati...

Thanks James. I see from the examples you posted that you are scanning magazines, which tend to be easier to lay more or less flat. As a book scanner, Czur hardware is useless. It can't fix the curvature of the pages, and it can't handle print that goes near the spine. The examples you posted are cl...

Lighting was an issue, yes. But this scanner is advertised as having built in lighting, and optional side lights that I paid extra for. I expected it to come with suitable lighting for ordinary books make of commonly used paper and ink. I don't think that's unreasonable given its cost. As for the so...

I think if maybe you have too high expectations. Scanning will never be as good as the original. I look at a successful scan as a scan that is perfectly readable, not something that is indistinguishable from the original. I don't expect perfection, but I do expect it to be readable. Clearly removin...

Yeah, it can ask be fixed with some work. The problem is that it needs so much work it's just impractical to do an entire book with over 1000 pages. The frustrating part is that ScanTailor can do all this automatically. If their distaste software was better it would go a long way to fixing these iss...

Sometimes pages are randomly green.

The software is very buggy. The sorting window doesn't show all 1006 pages: sort window.png The UI is hard to use. It's some custom thing and bits of it are just broken. For example, drop down menus close without letting you select unless you keep the mouse cursor over the scroll bar when letting go...