A point-and-shoot digital camera can be used to make scans.
Dragging around a heavy scanner while traveling just isn't practical for most people, and the few scanners that are light enough are prohibitively expensive for casual travelers. Luckily, even a basic point-and-shoot or a good cell phone camera can be used to make great quality scans with minimal effort.
Setting Up
Setup is half the battle. The key to using a camera as a scanner is proper and even lighting. While physically holding the camera in your hand is an option, you will have trouble holding the camera still enough to take a perfectly framed picture.
Use whatever you have at your disposal to put together a makeshift tower to hold your camera steady. If you have some books lying around, make two-foot-long stacks on the long sides of the sheet your are "scanning" and then rest your camera between the two towers to keep it steady. If the distance between the towers is too big for your camera, use more books or rulers or whatever you have to hold your camera in place. Once this is set up, you can quickly photograph all the pages you want and then upload them onto your computer.
Lighting
Even though your camera probably has a built-in flash, you will want to supplement it with additional lights. Lighting often involves trial and error, so try turning on and off different lights until you get the right balance. Take a picture with each light setting, and then you can flip through them to see which lighting setup works best.
Making a Permanent Setup
Only a few additional steps are needed to make this kind of setup permanent. If you are using books, you can simply bind them together with tape or string to create permanent towers. If you use rulers to hold the camera between the towers, tape those down and even tape the camera in place between the rulers. Make sure to go around all important buttons with the tape so that you don't have to undo your work later on. Using a long USB cable, you can even keep the camera permanently connected to your computer so you never have to readjust it again!
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