Good scanner near Denver or in Colorado

Built a scanner? Started to build a scanner? Record your progress here. Doesn't need to be a whole scanner - triggers and other parts are fine. Commercial scanners are fine too.

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rtpro
Posts: 2
Joined: 04 May 2016, 22:21
E-book readers owned: Android
Number of books owned: 300
Country: USA

Good scanner near Denver or in Colorado

Post by rtpro »

Hey there- I am wondering if anyone in the Colorado area has built a good quality scanner. I built one using David Landin's technique, but it hasn't really accomplished what I desired.
So I'm wondering if someone has built a higher end type of scanner that I might be able to try out and model (or even buy if you were interested). My goal is to be able to scan some photo books. With the scanner I built, the photos aren't reproduced acceptably- they're not bad, but not great.
Alternatively- has anyone out there had much success digitizing old photo albums or photo books? I can't take off the pastic page covers and really want to reproduce the images at a very high quality.
Please pm or e-mail me, or if you have advice just reply to this. And thank you very much!!!
-Ryan
dpc
Posts: 379
Joined: 01 Apr 2011, 18:05
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Location: Issaquah, WA

Re: Good scanner near Denver or in Colorado

Post by dpc »

If the photo books are spiral bound and will lay flat when opened, I'd just use a copy stand.
cday
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Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 14:55
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Country: UK

Re: Good scanner near Denver or in Colorado

Post by cday »

rtpro wrote:... has anyone out there had much success digitizing old photo albums or photo books? I can't take off the plastic page covers and really want to reproduce the images at a very high quality.
If quality is of the essence I think you will really need to use a flatbed scanner: as you don't need to scan slides or film even a fairly basic Epson or Canon scanner should produce good results. Scanning will be slow or very slow compared with photography, but there could be useful time saving in post-processing especially if you invest some time in learning the available scan settings options.

I would strongly advise looking for a scanner that uses a CCD rather than lower cost CIS sensor; unfortunately I see from a quick look at the specs that Epson's basic scanners that would probably otherwise be suitable have recently moved from CCD (Perfection V37) to CIS in the current Perfection V39 model. CIS sensors may produce good enough results particularly for documents, but rely on very close contact between the original and the scanner glass, so the plastic page covers could be a problem.

If you have the budget you could also look at higher spec models, which could be faster and also have more advanced features such as a facility to automatically compensate for dust or other defects. There should be a lot of advise on photo scanning, which is rather different from book scanning, available online.
rtpro
Posts: 2
Joined: 04 May 2016, 22:21
E-book readers owned: Android
Number of books owned: 300
Country: USA

Re: Good scanner near Denver or in Colorado

Post by rtpro »

Thank you for your input. I am trying to digitize my wife's scrapbooks- she has over 40 with about 100 pages each... So I would really prefer to photo-scan as opposed to taking the books apart and scanning the pages individually. They are post bound, and therefore do not lay flat without a platten. I've seen some professional level scanners that academics are using for copying ancient texts, or art based books- I would like to try to obtain high resolution results, but I'm not sure if I need the professional scanner to do so.
Any further advice would be helpful. Thanks.
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