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Cell Phone with Camera = Scanner

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thats-a-clever-idea dept.

An anonymous reader writes "TechJapan has posted a translation of an Impress Watch Article regarding a new technology developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, that lets people use their cellular phones with cameras as scanners. It says all you have to do is move your phone over the surface of the piece of paper while recording a movie, and the technology (some sort of software I presume) will construct a high resolution image from the individual frames of the video. Here is the original (Japanese) NEC press release." I'd love to see before and afters to see how well this works.

6 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Ocr? by rotciv86 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why make a hi-res image, why not just OCR it? That could probably even be done on the phone. Then you could email or send it as a plain text document, much smaller file size then an image.

    --


    My ghEtt0 webpage.
    1. Re:Ocr? by Mwongozi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because it might not be text?

    2. Re:Ocr? by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      OCR is overrated still. It's not that accurate, and needs more processing power than your cell phone has on board. It's still not ready for primetime.

  2. Old tech by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I remember seeing news about Japanese scanner pens (smaller than any cell phone nowadays) that would let you write with it, OCR scan text, and it store the text. I don't have a link right now because I'm lazy. But those were a few hundred dollars back then - maybe eight years ago.

    This is probably just a combination of that technology (which never took off here) and the cell phone feature craze.

  3. Re:that's great but... by SoTuA · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's funny, but it also is true. I would love to have a cell phone that is small, nice looking and JUST MAKES CALLS AND STORES ADRESSES! Why must we overpay for tons of features that we don't want or need.

  4. Re:that's great but... by cK-Gunslinger · · Score: 4, Insightful


    I seriously doubt that you are *overpaying* for features.

    Compare the situation to PC hard drives: You can get a 120GB HD for something like $80. That's like $0.67/GB. By that logic, if you only wanted a new 10GB HD, you should be able to get one for $7, right? But you can't. There's about a $30-35 minimum outlay for a harddrive. Once manufacturers have the basics in place, adding extra/bigger platters in almost *free.*

    Near about the same thing with phones. You can probably get a barebones, does nothing but make calls and store numbers cell phone for about $75. But since all the electronic components are already there, they can easily add in a gazillion sotware features for very little $$ and charge $100 for it, which they vast majority of people will pay for.