I have a large collection of old documents and images requiring digitisation for over a decade now. The reason I’ve been holding off is that the scale of the work meant that I had neither time time or equipment to do this properly until now. I have vast amounts of storage, digital asset management tools, film and slide scanner, flatbed document scanner – all set.
However what if the documents to be digitised are very old and bound. These are unsuitable for a flatbed scanner. Using a flatbed scanner is also hugely time consuming. So down the rabbit hole I went, a voyage of discovery which involved learning about commercial book scanners and all sorts of options, from industrial strength and expensive to hand made and not really what I was after.
I learned a book cradle would be essential so support the book without breaking its spine. These are typically large and elaborate which means they consume a lot of space and are expensive, even to build. My solution, two pieces of perspex, $13 from Amazon. It’s small and means the book is easily manouvered under the camera. So a win there.
But what about the camera? IPEVO make a range of inexpensive document scanners which are actually a camera on an articulating frame to position the camera over the document. For even more win, they supply software dedicated to the task which makes taking images quick and easy with good quality results.
However the book on the stand required the camera to be higher than the supplied stand. This led to the discovery of a desk mount articulating camera stand which was also relatively inexpensive. This came with a ball head and rotating mount which made positioning the camera parallel to the page very easy. A few adapters from amazon later to connect the camera to the stand and here we are.
The software is designed for the job, has a grid for easy alignment and is fast which is good because there are hundreds if not thousands of pages to be digitised. And the good news, while it took a few weeks of research, this solution was quite inexpensive and works great.
For even more win, this solution is highly portable which means I can take it wherever there are things to be digitised. It just needs a corner of a table to clamp the camera to and it is good to go. Super pleased with how this worked out.
