[amenghra]

An open source all-in-one-printer would be a great device to have. For eg I would love to have the scanner include a camera. So I can get “instant scans” most of the time, and a higher res scan when needed. Maybe the camera could also notice when the person making copies or scans forgot their original and ping them?

[sunshinesnacks]

The required super wide field of view for the camera could be tricky, without making the box really deep. Or am I not thinking about it right?

[nerdsniper]

You'd probably need some basic custom lens (not crazy $$) that would distort the heck out of the image, but you could correct the shape in software. Given that GP wanted this to be the "low quality / high speed" secondary scanning option, the inevitable loss of quality would be acceptable.

Seeing chromatic aberration on a document scan would be strange, but this is basically how many document scans are created today (using phone camera + software correction). It's just the lens effects from this cheap lens would be a lot worse than what Apple/Samsung/Google can do with their super expensive to design custom lens stacks.

[KennyBlanken]

That's pointless when ADF scanners will do a dual-side scan, at around 2-3 seconds per page, and more importantly, can do so with a stack of pages.

They've been around long enough that you can find them all over the place used for quite cheap and they likely only need a cleaning.