[Commons-l] Digitisation equipment

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Andrew
Turvey<andrewrturvey at googlemail.com> wrote:
> We had a discussion at a recent Wikimedia UK board meeting about potentially
> buying some digitisation equipment which could be used to generate content
> for the Wikimedia projects. This recent email to the EN-WP list sparked my
> interest.
>
> Does anyone have any experience with equipment like this, and could you
> recommend anything? Any idea what the price range and quality typically is?
>
> Also, is anyone else in the Wikimedia community currently doing this?

For digitizing what?

Archive.org digitizes books using a pair of canon 1Ds (? perhaps it
was a 5D? In any case the 5DII would be sufficient now) on a custom
stand with a hacked up copy of gphoto2 to actuate the cameras.

Turn the page, click a button...   It avoids the stress on the books
that a flatbed scanner would add and is faster to boot.

I'm not sure how they're dealing with curvature (I think they just may
lay a glass plate on the pages), but it would be easy enough to solve
using a laser pointer with a pattern generating holographic grating
and a second exposure to capture the page distortion and some fairly
simple software processing after the fact.