tips for using a hand-held scanner

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Dear Dr Dienes,
  You are right saying "a scanning pen might be more practical" in
"normal" situations than a digital camera.

  Digital photography is not a very easy task, as a matter of fact.
    1. No precedents whatever to have allowed readers to bring one in.
    2. distance at 35cm or less will require a great effort to set
       the object to be a perfect plane parallel to the film: you need
       a) a non-reflexive glass that makes the object planar
   and b) a level (a tiny roundish thing that helps you to set an object
         horizontal).
       c) a camera holder that clamps on to the desk and put the camera
         at a distance from the object.
       Note: digital cameras usually do not allow you to set
        the aperture manually. If yours allows it, you don't need to
        set the object to be pefectly planar.

On the other hand I have been using a scanning pen for 30 months with
remarkable success. Its specs are:
    manufacturer: Fujitsu
    name: RapidScan RS-20
    dimension (w d h in mm): 183 x 17.6 x 14.7
    weight: 80 g
    resolution: 400dpi
    speed: 2.6 seconds for an A6 paper
    power: from the PCMCIA card
    scanning area: width = 105 mm, length = 356 mm
    colour: b/w (monochrome or gray)

The most popular hand held scanner in Tokyo (I'm there temporarily
this month) is Matsushita's, but its width of 50mm is too small for
me as I want to scan vertically as much as possible.

Hand-held scanners have their own problems: if you scan too fast,
the image will be lost; the speeds of the right end and the left
end may differ; the whole scanner may wander to nowhere,..

There is a very good solution to all this: make a card board
that is slightly larger than the effective scanning area and
sandwitch the page with it together with the transparent folder.
  You now have the page on a solid basis and the scanner will
move very smoothly on the folder. I use a card board of wood
that is made out of chopped wood (it's called hard board here:
it is very solid, yet very light. I don't adore veneer very much.)
  The problems arose due to the unevenness of the page and its
rough surface: the scanner will not contact with it firmly then.

If you work in the US libraries where I assume most of the things are
allowed, I would advise you to use an ordinary A4-sized flat-bed
scanner. Recommended specs are:
    weight: 1.5 kg
    thickness: 30mm
    scanning area: A4, US letter
    manufacturer: Fujitsu (Mustek), Canon, Epson, HP,..
    interface:USB
    price: US$80 to $110

The low-priced scanners use contact-type sensers so that you may
need to press the object onto the scanner. (it won't allow an object
floating 0.5mm off the glass surface). They are not suited for
scanning thousands of pages, but are much, much easier than hand-held
ones.

Lastly, if you often work among the book shelves, writing down
bibliographical data, a hand-held scanner (the most popular one
is about 70 x 17 x 20mm -- it should be called a finger-held scaner)
with an A5-sized hand held computer may suit you.
 As most hand-held scaners will allow you to start and end the scanning
with a button on the scanner, i.e. without touching anything on the computer,
you may not need to carry around the computer among the book shelves.

Cheers,
Tsuji

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