DigiCam for OCR

[dennisfey at attbi.com]

Friends:

Looking to use a digital camera as an alternative to flatbed scanning of 
fragile rare books--ultimately, outputting B/W images appropriate for 
processing with Optical Character Recognition software.

With a flatbed scanner you can get a 300dpi letter-size B/W scan output as 
a TIFF at around 100K bytes, which is satisfactory for OCR.

Now, some cameras can operate in "text mode," which is, I guess the 
equivalent of B/W scanning, but I can't get from any of their specs whether 
this can output to an uncompressed TIFF file format.

Probably because most folks are shooting color photos for print, TIFFs are 
spec'd out only for "high res" images, and not for B/W (text mode).  So, I 
can't even find out if this is a capability.  Alas, manufacturers product 
specs, online buying guides, and on-phone reps have been of no help.  It's 
hard to believe that I'm the only one looking to use a digital camera for 
this application!

Any help greatly appreciated!

Dennis