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Digitization Equipment Review: The CopiBook

The Copibook is an overhead scanner from a company in France called i2s.

It's sold here in America by iimage Retrieval. Although they have many fine products, I am only reviewing the CopiBook.

The machine runs off of an internal computer and can output to a network, to another computer, or to a flash drive.

The equipment is easy to use, and easy to train. I can get someone working on it in 5 minutes for simple stuff, and 10 minutes for more complex items.

The CopiBook is designed to work with ambient light. It does this by making a “light map” of the whole scanning area. If there is a shadow, it will adjust the brightness of the scan in that area. If there is excessive light in another area, it will lower the brightness in that area. So, you get a very clean flat image. For people who have problems with lighting, you can add light to the machine as needed or move the machine to a better light location (where the light is more consistent etc.)

The image quality is wonderful. At 300 DPI it scans in color quickly enough to make scanning by hand a good experience. Although it doesn’t turn the pages automatically like the Kirtas machines, it does present a level of automation by having optional settings to automatically take an image when the glass plate is down and then release the glass plate when it is done.

In addition to being a decent book scanner, the CopiBook also scans flat images up to the size of one page of newspaper (still at 300 DPI).

Some of the coolest features about the software is automatic processing (cropping, de-skew, sharpening, curvature correction for pages), but all these slow down the scanning a bit if turned on. The automatic crop feature is fantastic, and will crop any size object placed anywhere on the scanning surface a large percentage of the time. This works well if you are doing lots of lose pages, because you don’t have to worry about getting the page centered each time.

Overall, I’ve been very happy with the CopiBook purchased for our digital lab. It’s speeded up 3 projects so far. One was estimated to take another month and was done in a day with the CopiBook. Another is a project with magazines, and it scanned them quickly with little or no glare (mostly because of the ambient lighting).

Expect to pay a lot for this kind of equipment. The grayscale version offers some savings, but to me it seems hardly worth it. The color is one of the seeling features of this item.

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