Hello. I’m not sure if it’s related in any way to piracy, but I don’t know yet of a better place to ask this question on Lemmy, and people often search for PDF magazines on pirate sites (like those from megathread). I have some old magazines, which I would like to scan - page by page - into digital form (for now for personal use) and merge scanned pages into PDFs for convenient reading. Some of these magazines have hundreds of pages each, so I would like to convert them to digital both fast (preferably a few pages in one minute), reliably (without blurred text and images in some places on each page), and in best quality possible. Do I need a professional scanner (for example in a multifunctional office-grade laser printer)? Could a decent portable scanner do the job just as right? Or is my phone’s camera with an appropriate scanner app completely sufficient for that? I would like to read your thoughts about this.

  • PagPag@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    If you want to do it efficiently, a camera isn’t the best way to go because it requires manually turning the pages. It’s cheap but labor intensive.

    Scanners are so cheap now that any decent one can be had for $120-200. But if you want to take this a step further, buy a second hand printer-scanner combo. Doesn’t matter if the printer is broken because you don’t need it. Just make sure it has batch scanning abilities.

    Get a cheap paper slicer /guillotine and rip the magazines into uniform stacks. Load into the tray and start scanning.

    The thing you’ll likely run into is the tray not having the capacity required to scan all sheets in one go. Therefore, you’ll need to scan part files and combine them on the back end. You likely need paid software for this, but there is probably open source options. Either way, fly the black flag lol…

    I did this after purchasing $800 worth of mechanical PE prep materials and wanted the flexibility and future proofing of my purchase. This proved a worth while endeavor after a flood took my hard copies. YMMV