[nfbcs] flatbed scanner recommendation

[Rasmussen, Lloyd]

At home I use an Epson V100 scanner. It has worked in Windows XP, and now I use it in Windows 7 with Omnipage 19. It interfaces using USB, rather than SCSI. It comes with software that pre-scans the page to determine whether this is a set of photos, a color document or a B&W document. It then sends it along to Omnipage. It is several years old, and replaces an HP SCSI scanner which I bought back in 1996. I'm sure it is long out of production, but the price was somewhere below $200. 
If Tesseract can deal with color images, I would look for a scanner that can do color or grey-scale at 300 or 400 dots per inch. Conventional wisdom used to be that this was the sweet spot for good OCR. A higher resolution may only increase the amount of noise superimposed on the printed characters.


Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress
Washington, DC 20542   202-707-0535
http://www.loc.gov/nls/
The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS.


-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of John G Heim via nfbcs
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2016 2:18 PM
To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List
Cc: John G Heim
Subject: [nfbcs] flatbed scanner recommendation

Anybody have a recommendation for a flatbed scanner for use with OCR?  I 
don't do a whole lot of scanning. Sometimes I scan my mail. Sometimes I 
scan in books. I probably don't need a top of the line system. But I 
don't know if I should be looking in the $200 or the $400 or the $800 
price range.

I also don't even have a Windows machine. I use linux with the tesseract 
OCR engine. So the software that comes with the scanner will probably be 
of no use to me.
Feel free to recommend a scanner even if you don't know if it's linux 
compatible. I'll check that.


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