7 Dec
1998
7 Dec
'98
6:04 a.m.
not critical that it be pretty - just readable. I
wouldn't be surprised
if you could rig up something like this pretty easily yourself; pick up
one of the fiche viewers that they can't give away at most university
and government auctions, get a cheap flatbed scanner (even pretty good
new ones can be had for under $100), take the mechanism out of the case,
and bolt it to the front of the fiche viewer. You'd have to remove or
disable the light source, since the bulb in the fiche viewer provides
the illumination. I don't think you'd even have to mess with the focal
length much; the fiche viewers normally do a rear-projection on frosted
glass, and the scanner is set up to focus on a sheet of paper an inch or
two away from the sensor, so with a spacer or two it should just work.
That sounds like an interesting enough project that I might even build
one if I had anything on fiche to scan. (I'm more interested in getting
You could do it even without changing the scanner at all. take two
mirrors and build a 'hat' for the fiche - the light will pass the fice at
one side, get reflected by the mirrors and be passed back, now thru
the fiche. This works quite will since in most scanners the light runs
some one or two cm in front of the scannerline. Of course the 'hat'
has to be adjusted to this angle. It works quite well for pictures, but
for a fiche you might need a _real_ high resolution scanner. If the
fiche document is made from ordinary 'typewriter' papers or drawings
(like most of my 1960s/70s mainframe fiches) the resolution should
be better than 1200 dpi to get an idea of the text. If small parts are
to be viewed, >3000 is needed. One advantage of fiches is still the
_real_ high resolution :)
Gruss
Hans
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK