Amazon.com are now taking U.S. pre-orders for the Ion ISC02 Document Scanner. No sign of it on Amazon U.K. yet. ETA is rumoured to be December 2011. At $190 it’s going to be a bit more expensive than the $150/£129 it was first touted as back in January 2011. I’d guess about £159 in the UK, if Amazon UK ever gets them in stock.
I’d imagine that images captured at that distance won’t have the massive resolution that standard OCR software is used to, unless Ion have something special happening with the camera lens (an array of multiple cheap lenses for gigapixel capture?). But if general software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro can OCR even tiny footnote text from the page images, then the Ion ISC02 is going to be a winner.
The best buy page says it captures at 2592 x 1944px. (5 megapixel). The Ion webpage says it uses two cameras. Should be good enough for newer novels. Maybe not the best for your comic book collection.
Thanks for the additional info, Z. Looks like it might not be suitable for some sorts of academic books?
Today I ordered the Book Saver from Amazon for $189.99, with estimated delivery date December 7, 2011 – January 18, 2012. As this portable book scanner has been vaporware for some time, it’s hard to predict whether nor when it will actually appear.
Given the probable lens quality and image resolution I’m not optimistic that OCR of the images will be very accurate, although preprocessing of the images including resolution upscaling might help. I would be slightly more optimistic if the camera took single page rather than double page shots. I really wish I could find a portable scanner stand that would let me use my own camera with high-quality lens and a large sensor chip.
But if the Book Scanner can at a minimum produce images that are quite readable on a computer screen, it would meet some of my needs and justify the price.
I’ve scanned thousands of unbound pages from a ScanSnap scanner into DEVONthink Pro Office with OCR, and the resulting searchable PDFs are very useful. But using a flatbed scanner to scan books and journals is sheer drudgery.
It would also be an unpleasant chore to take digital images of an entire book using a handheld digital camera. But I often do take a good digital camera with me to a library and get good OCR results from images of selected pages of books.
If and when the Book Scanner is delivered, I’ll post a review on Amazon.
It’s no longer listed on either Amazon USA or the Ion website. Looks like it was vapourware after all…