(Archived) Bought Camera To Use With Evernote - Did I Make A Mistake?

[terriblue 0]

I have been wanting to get a point and shoot camera for awhile now. I saw that if I got 200 GB of storage on Picasa web albums that I would get a 4GB Eye-Fi SD card for free. So I decided to get that and shop for a camera that could use the card.

I decided to get a Canon PowerShot 1200 Digital Elph because I don't need a lot of functionality and it seemed reasonably priced at $140.00 at Amazon.

One of the things I want to be able to do is to use it at the library to take photographs of magazine articles and upload them to Evernote using Eye-Fi. My library has free wifi so that should be possible.

However, I notice that there is no mention of a macro setting on the camera. I was surprised. Have I made a mistake by buying this camera, or should I be able to take a photograph of a page of a book with any point and shoot camera and get reasonable character recognition?

Terri

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

IME, trying to photograph a magazine article or page of a book & actually being able to read it is an exercise in futility. And I can't think of an option to do what you want to do. There are small, travel scanners but they have to be hooked up to a computer, so you'd need your laptop, too. Plus, the travel scanners are sheet fed, not flat bed. So unless you ripped the pages out of the magazine or book, you wouldn't be able to scan them. And if you did rip the pages out, I doubt you would be let back into that particular library.

The closest thing I can come up with is to make copies of the articles & then scan them when you get home. But I'm guessing since (IIRC) libraries charge to use the copiers, you probably don't want to do that.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Actually, there used to be some no name scanners you simply moved over the page. Probably at some gimmicky place like Hammacher Schlemmer. I think I'd seen one that had internal storage, so didn't need a computer. But I've not seen anything like that recently.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

http://www.hammacher.com/Product/78067?promo=search

[terriblue 0]

Thanks for the responses so far.

I thought it was supposed to be a common thing for people to take photos with their iPhones of notes and send them to Evernote for character recognition... like wine labels and ideas scribbled on cocktail napkins. If you can do that with an iPhone I figured I could do it with a digital camera. I was actually hoping to cancel most of my magazine subscriptions. I don't think I am willing to buy a hand held scanner, however, although it looks like a nice device.

I do have a macbook, which I could take with me to the library if I wanted to, but my canon scanner is a monster :-)

Terri

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I thought it was supposed to be a common thing for people to take photos with their iPhones of notes and send them to Evernote for character recognition... like wine labels and ideas scribbled on cocktail napkins. If you can do that with an iPhone I figured I could do it with a digital camera. I was actually hoping to cancel most of my magazine subscriptions.

True. But when you take a photo of a wine label or napkin scribble (on iPhone or regular ol' digital camera), the text/font is (normally) still a lot larger than the text when you take a photo of a magazine article. Think about it...most people write larger than the standard magazine font. And I've taken photos with my iPhone of labels on a bottle (ingredients which are printed quite small) as well as business cards that were too blurry to read.

[terriblue 0]

I figured as long as I was asking about this camera I would ask on the Photoshop Elements User Forum as well. What I found out is that it actually does have a macro setting and I even found it in the user manual which I downloaded from the Canon web site. So taking photos of articles may be iffy at best, but I will have a better chance than I thought with the macro setting available to me.

At worst I got myself a digital camera.

Terri

[katahdin 8]

but I will have a better chance than I thought with the macro setting available to me.

Let us know how it works!

[bernynhel 1]

I used to take macro photos of things like watch works and antique marbles with my camera lens as close as 0.5" from the subject - a little Sony DSC-5 - and pics were awesome. Yeah, I'd like to know how you do with the snaps of zine articles, too. I used to have a minox film camera in the '60s made for documents - 007 stuff - and that worked OK - and so I'd be surprised if you cant work it out in digi.