14 Apr
2009
14 Apr
'09
3:53 p.m.
Alexandre Souza wrote:
Anyway, is a slow and troublesome way to scan them.
Is there an
automatic scanner?
Yes, there are step and repeat scanners made by companies like Canon
and Mekel. They are expensive. I have a first generation model Mekel
that I paid over 10 thousand dollars for (which is a fraction of its
new price). DEC used very small frames which require a lot of fiddling
to get the parameters set correctly. Scanning services exist, but the
test scans I got from them were not well aligned.
I have fiche for most of the RSX and VMS releases up through 5.0, and
several sets of the blue FE fiche kits, layered products, etc, etc but
it takes a VERY long time to do anything with them. Since I can scan
thousands of pages of paper per day, guess what gets done?
The "low cost" (ie. 1000$) scanners are modified desktop fiche readers
that work like the xerographic fiche printers (mirror which flips to
a drum) and are manual positioning.
As I've found with paper scanners, the low-cost ones are barely usable.
You need to find a "pro" one used to get any sort of throughput, then
enjoy expensive or non-existant hardware support (the Panasonic KV-S3065
I'm using now is the first scanner I've had that I was able to get a real
service manual for) and expensive software (the blueprint scanning software
cost as much as I paid for the scanner).