> On Jun 23, 2020, at 11:34 AM, Jenn Morris <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> There’s the Epson 12000XL scanner. It comes in 2 models; one is just flatbed and the other can do slides and negatives. But flatbed scanning can be very slow especially at 600 dpi. For the same price or less you could probably setup a camera copy stand with LED lights that would enable quicker capture although you might only get 400 dpi, which I think is actually acceptable for text. A Canon EOS 5DS DSLR will give you 50mp.

I’d agree on the camera stand vs. flatbed scanner.

I have an Archivist book scanner : http://diybookscanner.org/archivist/
And it’s many orders of magnitude faster than using a flatbed scanner.

(although, I admit, I’ve yet to figure out why the cameras don’t reliably get detected when I boot it up, so I sometimes have to play with the cables and reboot it a few times … but once it comes to scanning, it’s way faster than my flatbed scanner or my sheet-feed scanners.)

If you were to get something professional made, you wouldn’t have to deal with the same problems, although it might be more expensive. (And it’s only complicated because it’s a book scanner, taking two images at once.  If you’re just using a similar camera you wouldn’t have to deal with the interlacing issues)

Also, if you’re dealing with negatives, you can get underlit camera stands.  They had one that they used for imaging glass plate astronomy slides at my former place of work that was about 24” square

And if anyone’s thinking about building their own camera stand in the DC area, back before everything stopped because of the coronavirus, Community Forklift had a couple of vertical process cameras.  It would already have the lights, platen guide, stand, etc, you would just need to find a way to mount a camera to it.  (Hopefully, mounting it where the lens is now, so you could use the crank to adjust the camera height to deal with larger or smaller documents). They were over near the radiators when I was last there

-Joe

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