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AndrewK
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Quote AndrewK Replybullet Topic: Digitizing and Scanning
    Posted: 10 June 2007 at 10:56am
To aid in the growth of these forums and the amount of FSI programs I think it would be good to have some tutorials about digitizing and scanning. This post is a bit selfish as I pretty much know how to digitize but dont know much about scanning, good scanners, price range, scanning software etc. etc.
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Poetry
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Quote Poetry Replybullet Posted: 05 July 2007 at 1:33pm
Amen to this.

I'm pricing a sheet-fed scanner now. My little USB connected flatbed is great, but it takes about 40 sec per page to scan one in. At 370+ pages in one book alone, that gets a bit onerous.

Any suggestions out there about sheet-fed scanners?

--Poetry
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TheBigZaboon
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Quote TheBigZaboon Replybullet Posted: 05 July 2007 at 8:52pm
Poetry,
 
I've  found the combination fax/scanner/copiers/answering machines by Brother to be very, very useful.  The inkjet versions are cheap enough, and if you use the fax and copier functions, it helps to justify the cost. Scanning and optical character recognition software should be included in the price. (I think that Adobe products like Acrobat can be a bit pricey if you have to buy them just for this purpose.) 
 
I know flatbed scanners are cheap, but the price of these "combination" machines has been coming down steadily. Take a look, and please, please, please read the reviews, then compare features and reputation.
 
A few tips:
 
If you buy a machine with a sheet feeder, make sure that it will allow you to open it up to a flat bed scanner for the times you want to get just one page out of a book or manual. This will happen more often than you think, and the machines with just a feeder will leave you frustrated, even if they allow you to remove the scanner mechanism to scan something on a flat surface.
 
Beware of the types of machines that evolved out of a fax/answering machine. Some of these have a carbon-paper-like roll that is used as the ink source to print out your faxes. This is expensive, and a pain in the ..., well you know, difficult to do without getting yourself covered in inky stuff. And because they evolved a step at a time, the interface with your computer isn't always well thought out.
 
Get the best you can afford at the time. Some of the cheapies will cost you more in the long run.
 
TBZ 
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Poetry
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Quote Poetry Replybullet Posted: 07 July 2007 at 2:34pm
Hi,
Well, a few days ago I bought a small sheet-fed scanner that had good reviews and worked with my Mac laptop. 
 
Wow.  Just Wow.
 
It's the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M for the Mac.  It folds up into this tiny footprint (one of its selling points to me).  It cost $414 ($425 with shipping) from ProVantage. 
 
To use it, you install the software --the Print Manager and the Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0 that comes with it. 
 
It scans about 15 - 20 pages at a time.  Double-sided pages.  Scanned at the rate of about 24 per minute.  Both sides scanned as the sheet goes through the rollers. 
 
Wow. 
 
The software automatically tries to adjust the image so it is upright and centered.  It succeeds a lot of the time.  When I scanned 20+ pages at a time (40 actual pages of print), it would show a few pages upside down or sideways.  The Acrobat software cleans that up in a second or two.  Then I save the scanned group off with a filename.  If a page ends up badly scanned, I can delete it out of the group with Acrobat and add a re-scanned page. 
 
To give you some idea, it took me about a week to scan 25 pages from one of the books as it was painful to do the flatbed scans.  Last night I scanned 242 pages in one evening, qc'ed them, and bundled them together in one file.  And that was WITH the learning curve of the software and scanner.  Tonight I'm going to watermark a few of the pages as "non-profit use only" with Acrobat. 
 
So.  This is a success.  I won't be able to use it for the courses bound into books (all of the FSI African language courses, unfortunately), but for anything still paperbound like all of my DLI things, this is terrific. 
 
The paperbound books have to be sliced out into pages, but the pages can be hole-punched again and put into 3-ring binders later.  I haven't found a really good way to do this yet.  I'm looking for one of those old 1960s paper cutters (you know, the iron guillotines).  Right now, I'm using an Xacto knife with the book on a pad of cardboard.  Then scissors to clean up the edges. 
 
I've been using the standard scan settings.  The file for the 242 pages is about 32 Mb in size.  That's probably large, but it's really good quality images inside that file. 
 
--Poetry
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dzeltens
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Quote dzeltens Replybullet Posted: 07 July 2007 at 3:17pm
Poetry, this is good news for all of us! Thank You for Your time and energy spent on this.
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Chung
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Quote Chung Replybullet Posted: 07 July 2007 at 4:11pm
That does sound large. 32Mb for 242 pages... Hmmm...
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Poetry
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Quote Poetry Replybullet Posted: 24 July 2007 at 10:23am
Yeah, I found out why the first book was 32 Mb when I scanned the next three books (which are about 9 Mb in size for more pages). The flatbed must be taking a very high resolution scan of the page. Possibly why it takes 30-40 seconds to get a flatbed scan. The sheet-fed scanner uses about 128 Kbs per page scanned. That's much more user-friendly on bandwidth and storage and comes out with just as pretty a picture.

I re-scanned the first 25 pages from the first book through the sheet-feeder and the size of the file dropped from 32 Mb to 7 Mb. Wow.

I also found one of those "paper guillotine" style paper cutters at work hiding in an abandoned office. That's utterly smashing for me. I can strip a book to single pages in less than 5 minutes. After I strip it, I store the book in a 9"x12" manila clasp envelope. That keeps everything together.

So, books are now the least amount of time to scan as long as they aren't bound. Bound books are still giving me heartburn and there are so many good ones that I need to scan.

We're packing up our house this month in preparation for the big move to the new house. I'll find all the books in the attic very soon. And now I know how to get them burned off quickly.
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Poetry
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Quote Poetry Replybullet Posted: 24 July 2007 at 10:41am
One other thing that I wanted to ask:

When ripping the audio, are you all using any special equipment. I've recently been educated by a coworker that did this sort of thing for a living for the DoD many years ago. He said that the common cassette tape pulled through the audio channel to the computer only can get about 10 bits max and that really good quality audio is about 20 bits. Those 20 bit digitizers are unbelievably expensive ($5,000!!! I checked.).

I don't think this group is that concerned with it. I think that the recordings that I'm making have been pretty clear and clean (well, they still were recorded at DLI possibly in a garbage can). I think that if you could scrounge up a native-language speaking partner to practice with, you'd be fine.

I have this older decent quality stereo cassette dubbing deck. It seems to produce very good sound. I clean that up using the Polderbits software to break it into tracks and reduce some of the background crackle/noise.

But there's that doubt.   Is it good enough? What is everyone else using?    
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linqvist
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Quote linqvist Replybullet Posted: 24 July 2007 at 11:05am
Hi Poetry,
 
The materials I am using to digitizing the audio are Sony SoundForge software, an old boombox with tape player, 3.5 mm jack and my PIII computer Big%20smile.  I recorded using SoundForge at 22 kbs (bits rate) mono.  And I didn't have any quality problem listening to the files.
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Chung
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Quote Chung Replybullet Posted: 24 July 2007 at 5:09pm
I used similar methods to lingvist, but had Audacity instead of Sony Soundforge. I recorded at 44.1 kHz mono and then converted to MP3 at 32 kb/s in mono. Any problems in quality are due to the age of the Finnish tapes.

I have no idea why anyone here would use a 20-bit digitalizer unless he/she were running a business.


Edited by Chung - 24 July 2007 at 5:11pm
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