Building a digital copy stand

Robert Sneddon wrote:
I'm wanting to build myself a copy stand to take clean pictures of
paper and book pages. Scanners don't do a good job with bound books,
especially paperbacks with solid glued spines. The only scanner I know
of that handles books at all well (Mustek OpticBook 3600) is outside
my price range for this project.

Experimenting with my camera (Canon A640) hand-held, I find I need a
glass sheet to keep the book page flattened but I get reflections from
the glass appearing in the final image.

Can anyone give me ideas on how build a copy stand that will give me
scanner-like quality output? How do I arrange lighting so that the
paper is evenly illuminated with no glare?

Would a hand-held roller-scanner, similar to the ones they use in the TV
Countdown pgm., not be your best bet?

Dennis.

In message , Dennis Pogson
writes
Robert Sneddon wrote:

Can anyone give me ideas on how build a copy stand that will give me
scanner-like quality output? How do I arrange lighting so that the
paper is evenly illuminated with no glare?

Would a hand-held roller-scanner, similar to the ones they use in the TV
Countdown pgm., not be your best bet?

No accurate enough for graphics though, and marginal for OCR. I've got
one, an old Genius 4500, and played around a bit with it.

I've got some ideas from the discussions, thanks guys.

Key factors for designing and using a copy stand seem to be:

Control the ambient light, probably with a solid hood of some kind if I
can't darken the room I'm in completely. Blackout around the camera
itself to remove reflections on the glass. Remember to switch off the
flash (duh!).

Get the camera away from the work as far as practicable to flatten the
image.

Lighting at less than 45 degrees to the subject to prevent reflections
on the glass, experiment to flatten the levels as much as possible by
shooting a white sheet or 18% grey and then looking at histograms on the
computer afterwards.

Anything else I'll find out as I play with the idea.
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon

In article ,
Robert Sneddon wrote:

I'm wanting to build myself a copy stand to take clean pictures of
paper and book pages. Scanners don't do a good job with bound books,
especially paperbacks with solid glued spines. The only scanner I know
of that handles books at all well (Mustek OpticBook 3600) is outside my
price range for this project.

Experimenting with my camera (Canon A640) hand-held, I find I need a
glass sheet to keep the book page flattened but I get reflections from
the glass appearing in the final image.

Can anyone give me ideas on how build a copy stand that will give me
scanner-like quality output? How do I arrange lighting so that the paper
is evenly illuminated with no glare?

Take a look around for an old enlarger - Durst make good ones and with a
short section of 1 inch wide aluminium bar you could create a very
efficient copy stand.

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:09:02 +0000, bugbear
wrote:

Nervous Nick wrote:

That's a very good point, and excellent examples! I found that simply
inserting a black piece of paper behind the page being photographed
was usually a sufficient fix.

Yeah; I bought some sheets of matt black cardboard for this;
works rather well.

BugBear
On a related problem:
When I use the ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) to scan pages
there is bleed through.

Does anyone know of a scanner that uses a black background
when using the ADF?

Alternatively, would it break anything if I used a marking
pen to paint the white background piece in the ADF part
of my hp laserjet 3030?

Also, does anyone know of a scanner that can scan both sides
of a page in a single pass and is constructed so that it
would be possible for both sides to have a black background?


The scanners that I have seen advertisements for seem to
scan both sides at about the same instant, so you couldn't
paint anything black to avoid the problem.

In other words, the normal construction seems to be:
light sensor light
paper--------- (i.e., normally to backing
piece in two sides at once ADF)
light sensor light

but what is needed is:
light sensor light white backing piece
paper-----------------------------------
white backing piece light sensor light

The hp laserjet 3030 ADF is effectively like this:
white backing piece - (I propose "painting" black)
paper------------------
light sensor light