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What are its Limits?

Of course that sounds GREAT until you consider the limitations, which nobody really mentions in the press materials. The lighting conditions affect the quality of the text recognition so much that even the slightest shadow can throw the whole operation out of whack. You also have to play with the tripod quite a bit as you find the perfect distance between the camera and the document, and as you try and find a direction from which the lighting gives you the best “performance”. Even after you find a good distance, you have to manually focus the camera until you get the sharpest text, which can be frustrating when you are forced to readjust the height of the camera until everything is just right.

Scanning the MaxPC Magazine

Another limitation is that the scanner requires a relatively flat and non-reflective surface. You cannot scan text off of glossy text book paper, not if you want any useable character recognition. I managed to get around this by carefully shielding somewhat reflective documents so that they don’t glare, and in general that worked fine, but it proved fruitless to try and compensate for uneven surfaces like curved papers, textbooks, and wrinkled pages that refuse to lay flat on a table surface. This is why a flatbed can often help, because the cover can press the documents firmly onto the glass surface of the scanner.

Perhaps a more limiting factor is the area of coverage per scan. Philips says you can scan up to 1/4 of a full A4 size document at one time (the A4 document is just a bit longer than the standard Letter size you find in North American everyday use). This may be true, but I found that as a general rule the Vesta Pro CANNOT handle a scan on a regular page of text. The camera, mounted on the tripod with fully extended legs, just does not have a wide enough field of coverage to see all the text on a single line, even with standard 1” thick margins bordering each side of the text on a piece of paper. It comes close, close enough that you are missing about a word or so per line. You can adjust the camera’s angle so that you can fit the text, but then the character recognition heads south: when you finally manage to fit the entire width of the text, the character recognition becomes bad enough that every 4th or fifth word needs touchup.

The good news is that the camera can optically recognized characters down to even relatively small point sizes, given the right conditions I was able to get 8point Times New Roman text to transfer flawlessly. Even under regular and not so good conditions lighting, I could get 10 and 12 point text to scan with ease (the larger point size was almost flawless in every test I did). So at least the scanner works, and it works FAST.

So what does all this mean? It means you probably won’t be using the Vesta Pro to scan regular documents that use the whole width of a page. You will find that the camera works rather well for newspaper clippings, brochures, pamphlets, advertisements, and just about anything that is published in columns, rather than lines that run straight across the page. It is super easy to copy and paste two columns of text with little to no problems in the OCR translation. I was quite pleased with being able to scan several modest sized articles from magazines and news papers (the former requires quite a bit of prep work to make sure the magazine page is flat and reflections are minimized).

The sad truth is that getting a good scan requires quite a bit of setup and fiddling with documents and lighting and shadows, and even then you are limited in what types of documents you can work with. With time, however, you will find you can scan and copy/paste basic documents with little hassle, as long as you aren’t looking for perfect translation of the hard copy text into the computer. Sometimes an “i” might get mistaken for an “l”, or some words become garbled, but even a mediocre scan can produce fairly legible results that only require slight touching up in your text editor. With a good scan, you barely have to make any changes at all. And this compares rather favorably versus a regular flatbed scanner merged with basic OCR software. When you compare the total time to scan for a flatbed scanner (much longer than it takes for the Vesta Pro to take its 2 second snapshot) and the time it takes to run the OCR (again more time than it takes for PageCam to finish its 10-15 OCR translation), it becomes clear that the Vesta Pro IS a viable alternative IF you know its limitations. But in general, a flatbed is by far a more well rounded text to document device.

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