Ion Book Scanner

[Data]

The company Ion has almost finished their device that was shown at CES 2011 called the Book Saver. It can scan any of your books, comics and magazines.

You have to manually flip pages and then press one button. The pictures are saved to a 2 Gigabyte flash drive and the machine can automatically export JPEG's or create a PDF for you. The unit takes two seperate pictures at one time and saves individual pages. The gadget also recognizes text so you may be able to change fonts for the words and edit to your liking.

The Book Saver will retail for somewhere between $175 and $200. Expect to see it in late April.

[Areala]

I LIKE IT!!!

*huggles*

Areala

[KiwiArcader]

We'll have to wait and see what the reviews are like but I'm not convinced that the optics will be as good as a standard dedicated scanner to be honest. Its like photographing a book .... passable for casual reading etc but really not good enough for archival work. Still .... might be wrong. When is CES 2011 anyway? April 1?

[Data]

Computer Electronics Show 2011 was in Las Vegas Nevada on January 6.

[Thor]

Wow that is really cool! But I'm with Kiwi I'm not convinced of the quality.

[E-Day]

If this thing actually turned out images that matched the quality of a scanner, I would possibly spring for this. It would save me from having to dismantle issues, and save me from dealing with getting pages to lie flat when scanning staple-bound issues. However, after looking at hte article on Engadget about it, it doesn't look like it's worth the hassle. You have to lift the whole scanner unit to turn pages, and all it does is take a photo of the pages...through the glass covering the pages. I can see a lot of glare occurring. The only thing that intrigues me and that I see as useful is the optical character recognition.

[Anime-niac]

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/08/ion-book-saver-hands-on/

[Mister Zero]

If this sells at all, I'd like to see them giving it an overhaul to increase functionality. Chances are though, this will not sell well. It looks bulky and hard to use. The quality is probably not the best either. If 'scanning' a magazine only required me to take a digital photo of it, I'd pump out magazines all day long.

It would be nice if it produced high quality 'scans' because I'm sure then many of us here at RM would get one. It's too bad that we don't at least have a sample scan.

Looks weird:

and another, with what I'm assuming are real scan images:

It seems like maybe this company is trying to appeal to our demographic, they also make the iCade...

Also, where exactly would you store that huge scanner..?

[E-Day]

Well, it's something I would look into if the "scans" it produced were high quality, because it certainly looks about 100 times faster than using a regular flatbed scanner.