Forums

Sega Master System / Mark III / Game Gear
SG-1000 / SC-3000 / SF-7000 / OMV
Home - Forums - Games - Scans - Maps - Cheats - Credits
Music - Videos - Development - Hacks - Translations - Homebrew

View topic - Overhead scanners feedback? for scanning large amount of manuals and magazines

Reply to topic
Author Message
  • Site Admin
  • Joined: 08 Jul 2001
  • Posts: 8644
  • Location: Paris, France
Reply with quote
Overhead scanners feedback? for scanning large amount of manuals and magazines
Post Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2020 11:38 am
I've been looking at overhead scanners in order to tackle magazine and maybe manuals.
There aren't too many available on the market, most reviews seem to point to either:

Fujitsu SV600
https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/scansnap/s...
https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/COMP/fel/scanners/documents/brochures/sv600-en...

or

CZUR ET16 / ET18 series
https://www.czur.com/product/et16plus


I was wondering if anyone has used those, or know someone or a place with those?

Curious about the effective quality. I know they are currently not designed for high picture quality (CZUR advertise ~250/275 DPI by default, FUJITSU state optical resolution is 285 to 218 dpi horizontal, 283 to 152 dpi vertical). FUJITSU SV600 is a little older (2016) kind of hoping they would come up with a newer better specs model. But I would also tend to trust Fujitsu better on the software/sturdyness front.

The aim would be to scan magazines and manual at higher rate (I suspect I have more than forty thousands pages of stuff to scan here..)

Reviews e.g.
http://scannernote.com/book-scanner-amazon/
https://techgearoid.com/scanners/best-overhead-scanners/
  View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
  • Site Admin
  • Joined: 08 Jul 2001
  • Posts: 8644
  • Location: Paris, France
Reply with quote
Post Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2020 12:11 pm
The CZUR page and the CZUR M3000 pages all have samples to download. The CZUR ET ones are surprisingly not in original resolutions I think, the M3000 ones are:
https://www.czur.com/product/m3000pro

It's surprisingly a little "meh" to be honest, but thick books are harder to flatten than magazine. Then the question is between using this and churning scans vs using scanner and not actually doing anything, maybe it is worth it?

Beside magazines, I've got large piles of local newsletters from all around the world, AU/NZ fanzines, tech documents etc.
  View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
  • Site Admin
  • Joined: 19 Oct 1999
  • Posts: 14685
  • Location: London
Reply with quote
Post Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2020 12:42 pm
It seems similar to book scanners with the similar aim to avoid opening to 180° and to un-deform the pages back to flat. There are open source projects which can maybe be used with better cameras for cheaper. See https://github.com/ad-si/awesome-scanning/ for some links. Having said that - I don't have experience.
  View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
  • Site Admin
  • Joined: 08 Jul 2001
  • Posts: 8644
  • Location: Paris, France
Reply with quote
Post Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2020 2:19 pm
TheNameOfTheGame pointed out to me that CZUR have been running a indiegogo campaign for their new Shine Ultra:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/shine-ultra-next-gen-portable-powerful-scanne...

Which is a little bit lower specs but also very cheap (119 euros shipped) and I presume newer software etc. So I decided to buy one before the campaign ends and we'll see how it goes. If it feels good enough I may end up buying a higher spec one later.
  View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
  • Site Admin
  • Joined: 08 Jul 2001
  • Posts: 8644
  • Location: Paris, France
Reply with quote
CZUR Shina Ultra review
Post Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:00 am
I have tested the CZUR Shina Ultra: 13 megapixels, software v2.1.
Short review: the results are currently very poor and disappointing.

- Software can only export JPG with a small amount of predefined settings. Cherry on top: has an option to export to TIFF but it basically takes a JPG and save it as TIFF.
- Image quality is disappointingly bad.
- Curves are not detected very well. The interface to fix them is tedious.
- It isn't possible to manipulate curves and do post-processing after the fact, basically the source data is hidden in some cache/folder and you have to do stuff in one session if you want a chance to use e.g. export.
- Software has little amount of facilities to work on a "project" (redo bad pages out of order, name things etc.).

One good thing: you can export to PDF with an OCR layer for search-ability and the OCR support multiple simultaneous languages (bit tedious to set up but possible). Again it's unfortunately not a feature you can use after the fact.

Unfortunately as I feared, one major bottleneck of those technology is going to be poor software. Those things are taking off but It'll probably take a years until things stabilize, and maybe there will be standards and open-source software to do all the post-processing.

Attached some samples of the type of things I get with CZUR Shine Ultra. Note that this isn't their best specs scanner but assuming all software have same issues it's not worth trying a better spec one.

There's a competing solution: RIviCamer
Last one (20 megapixels) on Kickstarter for $229
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rivicamer/rivicamerthe-next-generation-5k-p...
I am probably going to buy it if only to see how their solution is..

  View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
  • Site Admin
  • Joined: 08 Jul 2001
  • Posts: 8644
  • Location: Paris, France
Reply with quote
Post Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:17 am
Here's another test of the CZUR Shina Ultra with Ghostbusters European manual:
- Left page: the finger cot was not removed
- Right page: the finger cot was removed but the result is awful
It does sometimes works better but has too high of a failure rate.
searchable pdf.pdf (1.24 MB)

  View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
  • Joined: 25 Jul 2007
  • Posts: 716
  • Location: Melbourne, Australia
Reply with quote
Post Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2021 8:06 am
I guess what you really need is one of these

https://www.treventus.com/scanner/automatic-book-scanner

https://www.smascanners.com/en/categorie/robotic-book-scanners/

Though that's probably out of your price range, I wanted if they can be hired anywhere.

Alternatively if you're keen you could try to build one

https://forum.diybookscanner.org/viewtopic.php?t=3125
  View user's profile Send private message
Reply to topic



Back to the top of this page

Back to SMS Power!