Scanning Fiche

We installed a document imaging system at my office about a year ago; it has a Kodak double-sided paper scanner and a fiche scanner. The fiche scanner (admittedly low-budget compared to the $50K+ fully-automated scanner) is called a "ScreenScan". It's basically a standard fiche reader with what looks like the guts of a flatbed scanner mounted across the front. You insert a sheet of fiche, position and focus the page you want, and hit the "scan" button. It scans a linear image sensor array like the one in a flatbed scanner down the screen from top to bottom, at pretty much standard flatbed scanning speed. I think it's set up to do 200 or 300dpi; not the world's sharpest images, but most of this stuff is just for backup records of stuff that happened 20 years ago, so it's 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 my 2,000-3,000 science fiction and computer books on CD-ROM, personally, but I have yet to come up with a non-destructive method that's reasonably fast. I could take them to work, use the hydraulic paper cutter in the print shop to cut the spines off all of them, and then jam them through the auto-feeder on the Kodak scanner, but I'd hate to. I've even gone as far as scanning all sides of a couple of books and using a 3D drawing program to make a rotatable, zoomable "virtual book" that I could put on a "virtual shelf" in a "virtual library" and use as an index to the scanned text, but there's still something about touching an actual paper book that I can't let go of...) On Sun, 6 Dec 1998 15:15:17 -0800, Zane H. Healy wrote: -Bill Richman (bill_r(a)inetnebr.com) http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r - Home of the COSMAC Elf Microcomputer Simulator, Fun with Molten Metal, Orphaned Robots, and Technological Oddities.