Shoot and Scan With Philips's Unique Video Camera
More than just a Webcam, this little Philips video camera also scans objects and portions of documents.Richard Jantz, special to PCWorld.com
If you demand high-quality digital images from a variety of sources, your toolkit may require a scanner, a video camera, and a digital still camera. But if you're on a budget and your imaging needs are modest, Philips Consumer Electronics has a multifunction USB video camera--the $99 Vesta Pro Scan PCVC680K--that could suit your purposes.
At first blush, Philips's egg-shaped camera doesn't look much different from other compact Webcams designed for producing digital video and snapshots. But unlike much of the competition, the Vesta Pro Scan features a high-resolution, 640-by-480-pixel CCD sensor, which means it can produce sharper, more colorful images than less expensive Webcams with lower-resolution CCD or CMOS sensors. It also has an integrated microphone, which makes creating videos and Webcasts with sound easier than ever.
As with Logitech's $99 QuickCam Pro 3000, another USB Webcam that has a VGA CCD sensor and built-in microphone, the Vesta Pro Scan comes with applications that let you use the camera for videoconferencing (at up to 30 frames per second), video mail with streaming audio, and picture-taking. But the Vesta Pro Scan stands out from the QuickCam Pro 3000 and others in its class by adding a unique imaging feature to its bag of tricks: It also scans documents.
Simple Scanning Plus OCR
When you mount the Vesta Pro Scan on the handy telescoping tripod that's included in the box, you can use it as a stationary document camera for scanning a variety of images, ranging from photos to pinecones. The Vesta Pro Scan comes with special scanning software called PageCam, which uses a fixed scanning resolution of 640 by 480. Developed by Xerox, which is well known for its optical character recognition software, the PageCam application also includes a built-in OCR option so that you can even convert scanned text into editable copy that you can use in your word processor. You just place the document under the camera, adjust the camera lens to ensure the image is centered and well focused on the document below, "freeze" (or grab) the image with the software, and then either save it as a graphics file or convert it into a text file.
As you'd expect, this setup doesn't do as good a job as a dedicated scanner does, in several ways. For instance, even with the tripod's sturdy legs extended to the maximum length (about 11 inches tall), the largest area the camera can scan is only about one-quarter of a letter-size (8.5-by-11-inch) page. So scanning a stack of office documents would be tedious and time-consuming, to say the least. You also need to achieve good lighting and sharp focus prior to scanning with this camera, unlike when you use a flatbed scanner, which does those tasks automatically. And the Vesta Pro package doesn't include stitching software--more evidence that it isn't designed to do a lot of full-page document or photo scanning.
Once you've completed a scan, for any document you want to perform OCR on, you must first manually select the scanned text you want to convert by dragging your mouse over the copy on the screen. Then you can copy (or drag and drop) the selection into your word p rocessor. Depending on the total amount of text you're working with, this could be a very laborious chore.
Put to the Test
We tested the Vesta Pro Scan using a 500-MHz Pentium III system with 128MB of RAM and a 56-kilobits-per-second modem (running under Windows 98 SE) and found the camera easy to use overall. Like most current Webcams, the camera gets its power from its USB connection, which makes it a snap to install and easier to use with a notebook. In addition to a sturdy tripod, the Vesta Pro Scan comes with a small cloverleaf-shaped stand, which is good for setting the camera on top of a monitor for video conferencing.
The bundled software, including SmithMicro VideoLink Mail 2.0, Microsoft NetMeeting 2.1, and Ulead PhotoExpress 2.0 SE (for video mail, videoconferencing, and image editing, respectively) was easy enough to use. The quality of the live video was comparable to what we've seen when testing other Webcams via a 56-kbps (or slower) connection. Although the video images were slightly pixelated, the camera's controls allowed us to to adjust the frame rates and image sizes to help smooth jerky motion. The quality of still images was marginally better--with superior color contrast and sharper focus--than the results we've obtained with other cameras (especially CMOS models) in the same price range.
The camera's scanning features worked fine for photos and other bitmap images, but using PageCam's OCR tools to convert newspaper clippings and other postcard-size blocks of text was tedious due to the amount of manual effort required. Clearly, you'd be better off using a conventional flatbed scanner for faster, full-page (and higher-resolution) scanning.
We found the quality of image scans good enough for collecting reference material, such as a diagram in a scientific journal or an illustration in a reference book. With plenty of evenly distributed light, the whites are reasonably close to true whites, but you're not going to get the more robust colors, contrast, and sharpness that you would using a flatbed scanner, in which the scanning element is barely inches away from the original material.
Interestingly, you don't need direct overhead lighting to achieve acceptable results: In our tests, diffused room lighting proved adequate if we adjusted the brightness control in the PageCam's Options/Camera Settings panel. But placing a strong light source, such as a table lamp, directly above the document gives the best results possible.
Because it lets you do small scanning jobs, such as converting catalog text into editable copy, the Vesta Pro Scan has a strong competitive advantage over other Webcams in its price range. And the Vesta Pro Scan (including tripod and USB cable) is compact enough to fit into a laptop case, which makes it feasible to take along on business trips or excursions to the library.