A comment on
yesterday's blog post gives good news. The commenter wrote that on "18-20th June 2008 there will be an interesting event at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek in Germany. This event will group 4 manufacturers of automatic book scanners, that will present side to side their products. It is an excellent opportunity to invite all professionals who would like to make an independent comparison of these products." You can view the flyer for the event
here.
The four manufacturers taking part in this are:
I've not known about two of the manufacturers before. Thankfully, both side give a peek at the products.
- Video of the Qidenos QiScanRBSpro shows the machine working without the help of an operator. In fact, the way the machine is built, it isn't meant to have constant human interaction. It reportedly scans 1500 pages per hour.
- Treventus' web site also contains a video of its scanner. Their scanner reportedly scans 2400 pages per hour.
So...Two more competitors to watch and learn more about!
Technorati tag:
Digitization
5 comments:
The Qidenus product looks very interesting, with the variable cradle angle so you can optimize for the age of the book.
http://www.qidenus.com/QiScan/english/downloads/Qidenus_RBS_WEB_big_E.pdf
It's nice to see that several scanning devices will be available for examination of their various features. A critical - is not THE critical - part of this examination should be a range of image quality measurements from each product.
Increased speed in image scanning is less than helpful if the tradeoff is a poorer quality image that will not satisfy more critical uses down the road.
The event hosts should themselves scan the targets being developed for the Cultural Heritage community and post the acquires target images for public inspection and qualitative/quantitative analysis.
The Treventus book scanner uses a far superior technique than the other competitors. A distortion free scan and the page turning is done in one step with a simple up and down movement. And it's already in use at the Bayerische Stastsbibliothek.
It will be interesting to see if the scanners use native TIFF/lossless compression when creating the original image. I think some of them are shooting in JPEG (image quality loss), and then giving the option of generating a TIFF or JPEG2000 image later on in the processing stages, when the damage is already done.
An interesting article on open source involvement in book scanning:
[url]http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jan08/Ashmore_Grogg.shtml[/url]
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