31 Jul
2000
31 Jul
'00
10:30 a.m.
Tim,
I don't know a lot about scanners so I don't know if this is usefull or
not but I found a scanner that scans at 4000 DPI. I found it in a surplus
place and picked it up for $5 but later gave it to a friend of mine. It
was made by Nikon and I think the model number is "LS-5" or something like
that. It uses a HP-IB interface of all things! My friend checked with Nikon
and the engineer that he talked to said that that model had the best
resolution of any scanner that Nikon made, ether before or since. My buddy
also has the newest Nikon scanner but it's resolution is only about 2700
DPI. The LS-5 is made for scanning 35mm slides so I don't know what you'd
have to do to fit microfiche cards in it.
Joe
At 08:05 AM 7/29/00 -0400, you wrote:
Not so much related to classic hardware directly, but
instead the
*documentation* for classic hardware *and* software:
OK, let's say I've got a couple thousand sheets of microfiche, 4" x 5".
Each sheet contains ~200 paper pages of text and drawings. I want to
digitize
at least part of this, possibly OCR'ing it too.
Each 8.5" x 11" printed page on the microfiche is about 0.15" x 0.2",
so the magnification factor is about 50. That means if I want the equivalent
of a 75 DPI scan of the full-size version, that I need to scan the microfiche
at about 4000 DPI. The el-cheapo (i.e. a couple hundred $) scanners I see
on the shelves here seem to top out at 2400 DPI.
And 4000 DPI is the "minumum acceptable" number in my above calculation. If
I can do 4 times better than that, so much the better. In my experience
most 75 DPI scans of 8.5" x 11" text don't OCR well at all, you need more
resolution.
So what are my choices for higher-resolution scanners? My *other* hobby
happens to be large-format photography, so if the resulting scanner is also
good for 4" x 5" negatives and/or transparencies I won't complain :-).
It looks like there are 35mm film scanners with 2700 or 3000 DPI resolutions
available for a few thousand, but I think I need to do better than that.
Of course, I can go in the darkroom and enlarge the microfilm, but doing
that for each of the thousands of sheets is going to be tedious. Yeah, I
know, it's already a tedious job!
Finally, do *any* scanners have documented interfaces? i.e. say I find
myself
a nice SCSI-connected high-speed high-resolution
scanner. Am I going to be
reduced to point-and-drool with Windows 98, or can I actually hook the
scanner up to a real computer? We're talking about many tens or hundreds
of gigabytes of data here, so I'm willing to invest some effort to automate
the acquire/compress/archive process.
Tim.