Portable Scanner Solutions for Research? 446
Fished asks: "Lately, I'm finding that I need to do a lot of research in Libraries -- remember those? I'm tired of feeding dimes to the copiers, and would like to buy some kind of portable scanner to go with my Powerbook. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find one that will work. Back in the eighties, this were as common as dirt: they were small, four inch wide scanners that you could run over the page. Also, while I've found three portable scanners for PC's (from Antec and Pentax) even if I could somehow get them to work with Mac OS X, they are sheet-fed, which is useless for scanning pages out of books. Does anyone still make the old-fashioned Hand Scanners, and do they make them for Macs?"
Digital Camera + OCR (Score:1, Informative)
HP CapShare (Score:5, Informative)
Small Flatbed (Score:1, Informative)
Check Pricewatch (Score:3, Informative)
Quick-Pen (Score:1, Informative)
CanoScan (Score:5, Informative)
aedan
consider a thin flatbed? (Score:4, Informative)
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/scanners/csn1240u
while it is a flatbed, it is very thin and light. and, usb and power are over 1 cord, so no power adapter to carry.
Re:Small Flatbed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Copyright (Score:5, Informative)
Digital camera +tabletop tripod (Score:3, Informative)
1: dont use the flash (that's why you use a tripod)
2: set the book up at perpendicular as possible to the camera (to get a nice, flat picture)
3: be quiet (turn the sound off of your camera)
4: Dont get caught
Re:They didn't work... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They didn't work... (Score:3, Informative)
Glad you switched to a Mac now? (Score:0, Informative)
Don't you hate it when everybody else uses Windows and you chose a Mac just to be 'Different'. Now you can't find the hardware you want, the software you want, and the performance sucks compared to Windows.
Well, at least you're 'cool'!
Re:Digital Camera + OCR - here you go (Score:3, Informative)
Copy Stand (Score:2, Informative)
Canon printer/scanner (Score:4, Informative)
Otherwise, according to Apple's own site, Canon's LiDE 30 [apple.com] is the most portable flatbed scanner I can think of with OS X support. Now, a flatbed isn't good for travel, because it's easy to bump around the components and damage it internally. The printer cartridge might be your best bet.
Re:Digital Camera + OCR (Score:3, Informative)
Try the Casio Freedio. (Score:2, Informative)
C-Pen (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, if this has at all been useful, please feel free to buy [ebay.com] me one! I miss having it around.
Here a couple (Score:4, Informative)
I must admit that there doesn't seem to be much around, but then again this simply from searching Google. And for those of you content with scanning bar code from books, then there are fancy iMac coloured bar-code scanners [posdirect.com].
Re:Digital Camera + OCR (Score:3, Informative)
I Don't think it's that bad. I haven't tried it myself, but some other Project Gutenberg [promo.net] contributors have reported reasonable success with this. The depth-of-field of most flatbed scanners is very narrow, while the DOF of a digital camera is typically gargantuan. This means that fragile books can be photographed without having to flatten them out (and damage them) and without needing an expensive planetary or prism scanner. The OCR side of things would most likely be taken in stride by (shameless plug) Abbyy Finereader. Basically Finereader will reliably OCR all kinds of wacky stuff, and beats the piss out of all the others, hands down.
Make sure it handles B&W (Score:3, Informative)
Some suggestions:
- Get a camera that has a B&W (really greyscale) mode. Some do, some don't. It matters because it makes the files much smaller and you can fit a lot more pages onto the memory card.
- Don't use the USB or even firewire connection to transfer pictures. It's infinitely easier and battery-saving as well to get an adapter (if you have a laptop, a PCMCIA one) that can read the memory card directly; the OS will just treat it like a disk.
- If you can, put a sheet of non-reflecting glass over the page you're photographing. This is what they do when they make microfilm form books. But if you are going to carry around a sheet of glass, you might as well lug a scanner.
Re:Jesus Tits (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.
IRIS OCR Scanner Pen (Score:4, Informative)
C Pen (Score:1, Informative)
the original ones were independant which you download, but the latest one is a USB hand scanner.
I am doing a PhD and it is excellent - I just go to the library with my toshiba and hoover up stuff directly into reference manager. very quick, very accurate
Re:Jesus Tits (Score:5, Informative)
A) NASA didn't invent the pen, Fischer did, and sold it to Nasa, and it didn't cost Billions.
B) Pencils are terrible in space, all the little graphite dust gets into the electronics, causing shorts. Not a good idea on a space craft.
NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and developement costs were paid by Paul Fisher. No development costs have ever been charged to the government.
Because of the fire in Apollo 1, in which three Astronauts died, NASA required a writing instrument that would not burn in a 100% oxygen atmosphere. It also had to work in the extreme conditions of outer space:
1. In a vacuum. 2. With no gravity. 3. In hot temperatures of +150C in sunlight and also in the cold shadows of space where the temperatures drop to -120C
(NASA tested the pressurized Space Pens at -50C, but because of the residential [sic] heat in the pen it also writes for many minutes in the cold shadows.)
Fisher spent over one million dollars in trying to perfect the ball point pen before he made his first successful pressurized pens in 1965. Samples were immediately sent to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Manager of the Houston Space Center, where they were thoroughly tested and approved for use in Space in September 1965. In December 1967 he sold 400 Fisher Space Pens to NASA for $2.95 each.
Lead pencils were used on all Mercury and Gemini space flights and all Russian space flights prior to 1968. Fisher Space Pens are more dependable than lead pencils and cannot create the hazard of a broken piece of lead floating through the gravity-less atmosphere. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.ht
Re:Copyright (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Jesus Tits (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to be an OT stick-in-the-mud, but I've seen this jab quite a bit and I have to respond. Simply put, it's BS. Read about it here. [snopes.com]
Basically, you're not allowed (Score:5, Informative)
Recently my wife did some geneaology research in Pennsylvania for my mother-in-law. She intended to use her digital camera instead of feeding the copy machines, but all of the libraries, record archives, and courthouses she visited refused to allow her to do so, and even required she sign an agreement stating she was familiar with the rules of the place, all of wihch were about how she could not use scanners, cameras, or other copying mechanisms other than the copy machine provided by the library.
Perhaps I might be a of some help (Score:4, Informative)
But now my 2 about this scanner issue. First off, portable scanners are hard to come by. I noticed that both epson and canon do not make such devices.
OS X 10.2 supposedly has TWAIN support built into it. From what I hear you can now scan in Preview.app, which is cool. If you can acquire a portable USB scanner that supports TWAIN I would imagine that it would just "work" in Preview.app.
OS X 10.2 has fantastic device support. Typically, OS X supports just about whatever perhiperal I toss at it, regardless of whether the device ships with a "Mac OS" logo on the box.
If you can find a portable TWAIN USB scanner, I'd just purchase it. Don't worry if the device comes with Mac drivers or not. If it doesn't work, return it (so make sure you purchase something from a large computer store). However I'm betting it will work.
C-Pen 'Pen' Scanner (Score:2, Informative)
Google Search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="pen+scanner
Pen Scanner for Quotes (Score:2, Informative)
Otherwise a digital camera works pretty well.
Re:Digital camera +tabletop tripod (Score:3, Informative)
The old "spy" instructions I've seen for taking surrepetitious photos of documents suggests stacking two columns of books up to the focal distance of the camera was set to, and then suspending the camera between the columns by taping it to a pair of wooden rulers. Arrange a pair of desk lamps between the stacks to dump as much light as possible on the document. Snap, turn page, snap, turn page, repeat until done or caught.
Rather than the book columns (which were easy for a spy to come by without having to carry anything more than a tiny Minox) you could bring an ordinary camera tripod. This is a library, after all. I have a tripod that has a removable center column that works perfectly for copying documents. I pull the center column out the top and reinsert it into the bottom of the tripod's head, hanging the camera down below the tripod head and between the legs. It's a great copy stand, as there are no leg shadows. You still need to provide the light, as a photoflash will not go over well in a typical library.
Re:Logitech (Score:5, Informative)
I have one which I'll gladly sell to you. :-)
That having been said, get a Logitech QuickCam 2000 (or QuickCam Pro). It's USB, it's small, it's a good resolution, it comes with a small desktop tripod. The advantage is that in addition to using it to take pictures of printed matter, you can use it to take pictures of the microfilm reader displays. You can't do that with a scanner. It paid for itself twice-over when I did a research project two years ago. On the downside, however, it doesn't work with Linux (AFAICT) or MacOS.
Max OSX Handheld USB Scanner (Score:2, Informative)
This looks like a good solution.
Re:Basically, you're not allowed (Score:3, Informative)
Would it really be that hard to disallow scanners that rub against the surface of the book, and probably flash pictures, since they would probably annoy the other patrons, while still allowing picture-taking and flat-bed scanners (which are no more invasive than cramming the book onto a flat-bed photocopier in the first place)?
Seems to me like they're really hard up for the coins they want you to feed into the photocopier at double or triple what you'd pay at an independent copy store.
Re:Basically, you're not allowed (Score:2, Informative)
I add to my poor student's economy by working some evenings at a university library, and part of the job is to make copies ordered by researchers. The library does not get the books and journals for free, and the stuff is still copyrighted. Imagine that!
Part of the copying fees goes to the copied journals and their publishers. The library keeps track of what and how much is copied "in-house", and I suppose some of the money from the patrons' copiers (which for natural reasons can't be directly connected to any particular publishers) is pooled to finance literature acquisitions.
It's not surprising that digital cameras, scanners and whatnot are frowned upon, and the patrons aren't really that more careful with the journals just because they'd use the library's copiers than their own scanners. I think the main issue is money.
YMMV, this is at a Swedish university's biomedical library.