I have so much paper that I’ve been on a slow quest to scan things. So I have high speed scanners and other tools, but it remains a great deal of work to get it done, especially reliably enough that you would throw away the scanned papers. I have done around 10 posts on digitizing and gathered them under that tag.
Recently, I was asked by a friend who could not figure out what to do with the papers of a deceased parent. Scanning them on your own or in scanning shops is time consuming and expensive, so a new thought came to me.
Set up a scanning table by mounting a camera that shoots 4K video looking down on the table. I have tripods that have an arm that extends out but there are many ways to mount it. Light the table brightly, and bring your papers. Then start the 4K video and start slapping the pages down (or pulling them off) as fast as you can.
There is no software today that can turn that video into a well scanned document. But there will be. Truth is, we could write it today, but nobody has. If you scan this way, you’re making the bet that somebody will. Even if nobody does, you can still go into the video and find any page and pull it out by hand, it will just be a lot of work, and you would only do this for single pages, not for whole documents. You are literally saving the document “for the future” because you are depending on future technology to easily extract it. read more »