[John C]

I was bumming around other parts of the Internet (I know, right?  What else would one do besides reading old comics?) and ran across this:

http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-Trash-and-Cheap-C/

It obviously takes up way too much space for casual work, and clearly requires a bit of extra motivation and skill to put it together, but I thought that some people here might, at least, appreciate the idea here.  I mean, a device like this should be ideal for scanning comics quickly with little to no damage.

[rez]

That...is a great idear.
Thanks for posting.

[Yoc]

Thanks JC.
I've never been much impressed with the results I've seen from my limited exposure to Photos vs traditional scans.
Camera flash, perspective, etc seem to be an added wrinkle to the process.  I've seen images of a book scanner much like the one in your link being used by Google (IIRC) for their rare book project.  Someday I'll see an example of their finished product and perhaps change my mind on the idea.
For now a normal scanner seems to produce the best results with comics.

-Yoc

[John C]

Ah, but that's why I posted that particular project:  The guy figured out most (maybe all) of those problems.  Skim through the comments and you'll see that he at least thought about them.  In particular, he's using strong lights rather than a flash, which avoids the glare in the same way that those enormous photography lamps avoid red eye.  Also, the entire point of building the rig is to fix the perspective problems, so much so that I'd be willing to bet that one of the steps is something like "measure really, really, really carefully."

The sample book also looks pretty nice (as do almost all of Google's scans, by the way).

Again, I'm not suggesting that everybody run out and start a construction project, but I figure there might be someone interested in tinkering to see what kind of results we can get.

The biggest potential pitfall I see with a comic book, though, is that you can't rely on the gutter being empty; any content near the spine is going to be at the intersection of the plates, and obviously difficult to image.