27 Feb
2008
27 Feb
'08
10:48 a.m.
At 06:40 AM 2/26/2008, you wrote:
Grant,
I scan all of my boards at 3200dpi 48bit color in TIFF format. I'm
not going to upload any 3.5GB images (one for each side of an S-100
card). If you mail me a hard drive I will be happy to copy them. :
) Its faster to rescan them at 1600dpi 24bit than it is to open and
resave them.
Color scans are needed if you want to have a PCB shop make gerbers
out of your scan.
Grant
On a side note, who here would be interested in
ultra high resolution
scans of old computer PCBs? I'm scanning all PCBs at 3200dpi for
archival. Photoshop won't save jpegs that large, but a 1600dpi scan is
only 50MB or so. Some day I plan to release my whole archive.
You mentioned JPEGs. If you are archiving the scans in JPEG format,
try zooming in on bunches of traces or text on the board. JPEG creates
a lot of artifacts.
It may very well be case that a 600dpi scan using lossless compression
will be much cleaner and usable than a 3200dpi scan using heavy JPEG
compression.
Even with 6 mil traces, 600dpi gives you more than 3 pixels per trace.
I've tried a few of my boards using 1200dpi, 8-bit color, and GIF/TIFF,
with results that seemed acceptable.