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Video Magnification System for Seniors?

Posted by Cliff on from the reading-the-fine-print dept.

c4tp's friend asks: "Recently my Mother informed me that my grandmother's 80th birthday is approaching. She suffers from glaucoma and it is rather hard to read small text for her. The consensus with our family is to buy her a video magnification device, but the ones I found online were at the minimum of $500 (US), a bit steep for me (and my family). So what I am asking basically, is there a way to build/assemble the parts these retail devices use for a cheaper price?"

3 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. THIS IS NOT ON A COMPUTER SCREEN by c4tp's+friend · · Score: 5, Informative

    What I meant was say you take a piece of paper, maybe the daily paper, and you put it under this device, the device blows up your paper, onto a television screen, so you can see the writing more clearly. I did not mean enlarging things on computer screens.

    --
    I dont like it when people think about what I think (say). Rather I try to make them think like I think.
    1. Re:THIS IS NOT ON A COMPUTER SCREEN by Gudlyf · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Ah...that's what I thought. Like I said below, have you thought of using a cheap overhead projector (like this one)? I've seen them on Ebay for under $50.

      My wife's grandmother had issues with her hearing, so we started to send her faxes instead of calling her. If her eyesight started to fail, we could put transparencies into her fax machine and set her up with a small overhead projector in a back room. When she had a hard time reading the fax, she'd just put it on the Dukane in the back room to read it off the wall, which was plenty big for her to read. This would even work with single-page documents, where she could feed them into the fax as a copier, which would put the text on the transparency. This of course wouldn't work so well for books and newspapers.

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  2. I don't think he wants it for an OS... by r_naked · · Score: 3, Informative

    If I read the question correctly ... I think he is looking for some kind of camera / monitor setup that can be used to project / magnify on the monitor.... If that is the case I doubt he is going to find one for less than $500.00.

    First you need a Camera.
    Then you need an Arm. (That is IF this is the type of arm I think it is)
    Finally you need a Monitor (which I could not find one that took composite inputs for cheap AND still have the resolution to display a high quality image). But you can guess that it is gonna be ~$300.00.

    So if you add all that up ... you get > $500.00.

    Just my >$500.00 worth (sorry, bad joke -1)

    --Brian

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