William Wueppelmann writes:
 > > Cameras around $100 dollars are very low quality. You could get
 > > no where near the dpi recommended for materials that need to be
 > > OCRed. The quality of images from cameras would be not only low,
 > > but the OCR (even with the best software) would probably have
 > > many errors. For someone scanning items at home this might be ok,
 > > but for archival quality, I would not recommend cameras. If you
 > > are grant funded and the grant provider requires a certain level
 > > of quality, you need to make sure the scanning mechanism you use
 > > can scan at that quality.
 > 
 > To capture an image 8.5 x 11" at 300 dpi, you need roughly 8.4
 > megapixels, which is well within the capabilities of an inexpensive
 > pocket camera.

Or not.  Cheap cameras may well produce JPEGs that contain eight
million pixels, but that doesn't mean that they are using all or even
much of that resolution.  In my experience, most cheap cameras are
producing way more data that their lenses can actually feed them, so
that you can halve the resolution or more without losing any actual
information.  Such cameras will, in effect, give you a 150 dpi scan --
even if that scan is expressed as a 300 dpi image.

If you want real 300 dpi images, at anything like the quality you get
from a flatbed scanner, then you're going to need cameras much more
expensive than $100.

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <[log in to unmask]>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "I think it should either be unrestricted garnishing, or a single
	 Olympic standard mayonaisse" -- Monty Python.