Fiche scanning redux

We do quite a bit of document imaging where I work (almost typed "where I live"... ouch...). A lot of it is paper, for which they have some cool high-speed double-sided scanners that I play with once in a while. They also do some fiche, using something that looks like one of us built it in his basement. It's called a "Screenscan", and it's basically just the guts out of a flatbed scanner (just the scanning element and mechanism) bolted to the front of a normal rear-projection fiche/film reader. The reader has a ground-glass screen that it projects the image onto. The operator lines up a fiche page, sets the focus, etc, just as though they were going to view it normally, and then hits a button. The scan bar then moves down the face of the glass screen, capturing the image as though it were a brightly-lit piece of paper. I would think it wouldn't be too hard to find an old fiche/film reader and an old scanner and hack them to work this way. The light source is provided by the reader, so you don't need the bulb the scan bar and the screen to get good focus, but it should work. Now we're looking at $200,000 automated fiche scanners because we just got in a bunch of fiche from a company we bought and it would be cheaper to buy the equipment and do it ourselves than to farm it out. Those ought to be fun to play with too... Bill Richman bill_r(a)inetnebr.com http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r Home of Fun with Molten Metal, technological oddities, and the original COSMAC Elf computer simulator!