I am a genealogist and want to take pictures of wills, deeds etc... (paper text) and download it to my computer. Is there a digital camera out there that will do this and make it readable? Thanks, Carol

-- Carol Senior (Caroljake@aol.com), July 03, 1999

Answers

Doubtless you could do this with a camera, copy stand and suitable lighting, but wouldn't a flat-bed scanner be a better solution? Direct control from the computer, decent resolution, no lighting worries, and many scanners even come with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software.

-- Alan Gibson (Alan.Gibson@technologist.com), July 05, 1999.

I am going to assume that you must photograph these documents on-site and thus cannot carry a computer and scanner with you, plus look for electric outlets to power these devices, etc.

In the "old days", I used to go to libraries and photograph documents and pages from books and magazines using a film camera, and it wasn't easy. First you have to construct some device to hold the camera (I fashioned a "quadpod", i.e., a tripod with four feet) to hold the camera directly over the text (the lens I used was a 50mm macro). Because the distance to the lens varied with the thickness of the object photographed (book versus magazine versus sheet of paper), and because of the interference of these objects with the legs of the quodpod, is was a royal pain.

When forced to rely on ambient light, a cable release was required and the exposures were long. At other times I also used an off-camera flash, connected via a synch cord. Trying to keep the pages of a book flat and holding the flash and cable release was a balancing act, indeed.

These problems remain whether you use a digital camera or a film camera. However, since your aim is to photograph documents that will lay fairly flat and are of standard size (no larger than legal, I assume), your life will be easier. Constructing the stand is not difficult (wood with screw-in legs will work fine, and fastening the camera to it can be something as simple as using heavy duty rubber bands!) and tailor the height of the legs to the minimum focusing distance of your specific camera. Experiment with the on-board flash first. If this doesn't produce satisfactory results, try off-camera flash using a synch cord.

I will warn you that some digicam sensors suffer from what is known as "blooming", i.e. a reaction to images that contain numerous specular highlights, such as would be encountered when photographing paper containing text. The effect would be to show some fringing around the text, making it harder to read.

Most of the stores in this area (Cincinnati) allow the customer to try out a digicam and then return it if it doesn't meet their requirements. You could fashion a rough stand and experiment with the in-camera flash and also check for the blooming effect. Incidentally, I don't expect that blooming will be a serious problem -,just wanted to cover all possibilities!

Finally, if you wish to edit the results you won't need a scanner. Scanning software such as OmniPagePro 9.0 can open both JPEG and TIFF files. Of course you can simply read these files right off your computer screen (QuickView Plus Version 5 is what I use) or print them out.

Hope this helps.

-- Albert J. Klee (aklee@fuse.net), July 10, 1999.

Upon re-thinking your problem further, I think going the digicam route is not the way to go. The following should solve your problem in a convenient, very cost-effective manner.

Microtek has just introduced a scanner, called the "ImageDeck", that doesn't have to be attached to your computer. Plug it in anywhere and the files are saved (at 600 ppi and 36 bits-per-color) directly to 31/2-inch floppy disks or 100Mb Zip disks in the unit's built-in drives. (Documents may also be scanned and converted to text files with the unit's OCR software.) All you need here is access to an electrical outlet, and these, of course are not hard to find anywhere. The price is about $500. The only minus is that the unit only scans a page size maximum of 8.5" x 11.7", which means that legal documents would have to be scanned in two parts. Still, a small price to pay for the convenience. One of these devices would have saved me much grief years ago!

-- Albert J. Klee (aklee@fuse.net), July 11, 1999.