[KHS]

I have not even tried MSP's camera import features yet, but I'm looking for user impressions. I have maybe 100 fakebooks that I'd prefer not to tear apart and take somewhere for high-speed scanning (I'm too cheap). I have a HP 3-in-1 that works for my scanning generally and I've been using 300dpi grayscale for sheet music that I later edit manually in Paint.NET (a superb simple free Windows application) for de-skewing, rip repairing, tightening, editing, and cropping. But scanning on a simple 3-in-1 is SLOW!!!! and I'm getting old. Does anyone think I might be able to get decent editable images faster by using my Surface Pro 7's rear camera, whether within MSP or otherwise? I've been assuming that getting the image flat is easier on a flatbed scanner, but if users have had a good experience with camera import, I'd like to hear about it now. Is there any easy way to get the photo'd image out of MSP for my own pre-processing?

Anyone who wants to chime in with the suggestion that I just left them rip up my books, high-speed scan everthing, and then maybe re-bind the books using plastic coils is welcome to do so. Perhaps you could give me a hint as to the best places to go and how much I'm likely going to have to pay for that.

Thanks.

- Kevin

[Skip]

Check Office Lens.

[Zubersoft]

For my own personal use, I have a ScanSnap SV600 set up to scan two pages at once and I put a glass pane over the books to help flatten them out while scanning (this improves the results but isn't absolutely necessary). This turned out to be around 5-10x faster for me while scanning in my sheet music compared to using a flatbed scanner. There are cheaper options than the ScanSnap SV600, but I do like that the SV600 came with Adobe Acrobat, and the SV600 software handles flattening out pages, deskewing, cropping and conversion to grayscale or black and white.

As far as using the Surface Pro 7's rear camera, or another camera based solution, it really depends on the level of quality you require. If Paint.NET provides decent results after all the processing you mentioned, then this may be an acceptable solution for you. If I had to guess though, I don't think you'll find the pictures sharp enough. 

Mike

[BRX]

Hi Kevin,

I just want to point out, that it's likely a lot of, maybe most of your fake books have been scanned and uploaded somewhere to the internet by someone already . Mostly illegally of course and I won't point out where you can look for those. But if you find a PDF-scan of one or more of your owned books I consider it okay and you maybe should check before you start scanning.

[KHS]

For my own personal use, I have a ScanSnap SV600 set up to scan two pages at once and I put a glass pane over the books to help flatten them out while scanning (this improves the results but isn't absolutely necessary). This turned out to be around 5-10x faster for me while scanning in my sheet music compared to using a flatbed scanner. There are cheaper options than the ScanSnap SV600, but I do like that the SV600 came with Adobe Acrobat, and the SV600 software handles flattening out pages, deskewing, cropping and conversion to grayscale or black and white.

As far as using the Surface Pro 7's rear camera, or another camera based solution, it really depends on the level of quality you require. If Paint.NET provides decent results after all the processing you mentioned, then this may be an acceptable solution for you. If I had to guess though, I don't think you'll find the pictures sharp enough. 

Mike

Wow, what a beautiful piece of equipment for just over $500! If my stock portfolio would stop dropping, I'd bite the bullet, knowing it could also allow me to digitize old files, research notes, snapshots, etc.. If only it had a slide attachment for photos, I'd already be all in! [Believe it or not, I've retained an old Epson SCSI scanner with slide attachment and a Power Mac G4 that handles the SCSI in the hope that I'll eventually get to all my slides--talk about slow!] Thanks for the encouragement to look for a modern solution! Have you found the built-in "book curve" corrections to be inadequate (thus the custom glass you're using)? Would clear plastic work just as well? Does it provide its own light? FWIW, I notice in the Q&A on Amazon for the latest version that it no longer bundles Adobe Acrobat but instead its own apparently proprietary software. I also note that it apparently only outputs PDF or JPG, although there was one mention of a "Do Not Compress" option. One purchaseer commented: "If I wanted people to hate my product I'd provide software like this."

For the possible benefit of other users, the results I've been getting by processing 300dpi grayscale scanned PNGs with Paint.NET are very usable and clear. I'm getting pretty quick at manually de-skewing and cleaning up the images, tightening titles, composers, copyright dates, etc., before cropping the pages, and then printing them all together @ 144dpi to one PDF (using a CutePDF custom Postscript "paper" size that matches the widest and highest dimensions of any edited image within the collection) [yes, I know MSP could do the cropping for me, but I figure the import will be much faster (and the PDF smaller) if I've already done the cropping--but I realize that MSP could reomve the excess whitespace from each .PDF page that results from my image sizes all being different]. Mike's suggestion sounds a lot faster though!

[Zubersoft]

The "book curve" corrections aren't perfect. I'd say they are something like a 70-80% (in terms of a perfect replication of the page), while putting the glass over the book makes it more like 85-90%. You'll notice the most distortion on the part of the page that is the furthest away from the head of the scanner. I can share an example of a scanned book with the SV600 if you'd like. The PDFs I've created with this approach are not terribly optimized, so they are a little slower to load than I would like, but I didn't run them through Adobe Acrobat's optimization to properly compress the images (I may do that at some point). Clear plastic would work fine as well as long as it is heavy enough to flatten the book and hold in place and transparent enough not to reflect the light of the scanner.

Mike

[Jonk]

I have found Android App called "Office Lens" by Microsoft is a crazy good scanner. If you don't have on your phone, get it anyways. It's straightens out the book curve

[tjrob]

For me, using my printer/scanner/copier is too slow. I go to my town's library and use their book scanner. It will scan close to the fold of a book; you turn the book around to scan the other page. It is an order of magnitude faster than my p/s/c. I manage all my scores on my MacBookPro laptop, and use a virtual machine running Windows to run the MS Companion. As I now depend on my tablet for rehearsal and performance, I have three, and need to keep them in sync; the easiest way is to keep the "golden copy" on my laptop and download changes to each tablet.

[timothy42b]

I've been using my flatbed and yes it's slow and painful. But I just found my iPhone has a scan feature built in, and that's what I'm using now.
I go to the Files App, select Scan Documents, change to Manual Shutter, grey scale, and I save to Google Drive and import from there.