Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Researchers Develop World's Fastest Book Scanner
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Tokyo University researchers have developed a superfast book scanner that uses lasers and a high-speed camera to achieve a capture rate of 200 pages per minute. You just quickly flip the book pages in front of the system and it digitizes the pages, building a 3D model of each and reconstructing it as a normal flat page. The prototype is large and bulky, but if this thing could be made smaller, one day we could scan a book or magazine in seconds using a smartphone." The article mentions Google's similar dewarping system; the difference here is speed.
Now if they also will learn to shred the books in the process and sell the technology to Google, then I will really respect Vernor Vinge's insight (Rainbows End)
First, there are guillotine-style shears for cutting bindings off books that do no damage at all to the pages.
My bandsaw does no damage to the pages either. Clearly you haven't tried this. It worked for me, but I'm a small timer compared to the guys at bitsavers.org. They claim it works on an EXTREMELY large scale. I "saw" an ad for a paper shear (usually used for binding, and sorry for the pun). The shear was about 10 times the cost of my little tabletop bandsaw. If the market has changed and you can now buy a shear for the cost of a good steak dinner, well, I guess I'm out of date then. But even then, I needed a bandsaw for other purposes, and if its dual use, all the better, and I'd not be amused at buying, storing, maintaining, and evnetually disposing of two tools to do a job that one does perfectly well.
Second, nearly all the high-speed sheet-fed document scanners out there are duplex scanners.
New, maybe. Not in the olden times aka longer ago than yesterday. Maybe the new ones even duplex properly with paper other than standard 8.5x11 laser paper, and don't just jam on the cut edge. Maybe the new ones don't duplex at a speed about 4 times slower than non-duplex. You're the expert, I'm merely a guy who's actually done it.
I'm only saying what worked with what I had, and what I know other people have successfully done in the past, I'm not just some dude quoting specs out of a tiger direct catalog with an infinite budget for brand new gadgets.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Why the fuck are we scanning books? Isn't there, you know, a DIGITAL REPRESENTATION which is used during typesetting? This reminds me of that crazy story of the person who printed out a spreadsheet, scanned it in, printed out the scan, laid it on a wooden table, took a digital picture of it, then uploaded it to his web site (or something like that).