29 Jul
2000
29 Jul
'00
12:05 a.m.
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.
29 Jul
29 Jul
1:36 a.m.
New subject: Scanning microfiche
Hi Tim,
I am looking into the same problem, and the only solution I have
found that seems reasonable is a microfiche scanner. You can get
a used Minolta MS-1000 (not Y2K compliant) with a proprietary
PC interface card for ~$2000 (US$). A new MS-2000 with a SCSI
interface has a retail price of ~$6000.
You can also get a funky thing that attaches over the screen of
your microfiche reader and scans directly from that.
Finally, you can buy a reader/printer. My only experience with
these is the quality of the printed output is quite poor, and
scanning it afterwords wouldn't improve matters.
Let me know what you come up with...
clint
PS When (if) Cirrus Logic stock (Nasdaq CRUS) ever gets above
$25 I'm going to buy an MS-3000 (11x17) and a wide selection
of lenses.
On Sat, 29 Jul 2000 CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com 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.
5:52 a.m.
New subject: Scanning microfiche
Clint Wolff wrote:
I am looking into the same problem, and the only
solution I have
found that seems reasonable is a microfiche scanner. You can get
a used Minolta MS-1000 (not Y2K compliant) with a proprietary
PC interface card for ~$2000 (US$). A new MS-2000 with a SCSI
interface has a retail price of ~$6000.
I found MS 2000 info here:
http://www.minoltausa.com/mainframe.asp?productID=343&whichProductSecti…
The more expensive Canon that I mentioned in a previous post will do 600 DPI
and it can handle B-size (11x17 inch effective) documents, useful for
maintenance prints, but otherwise it seems similar.
I might suggest that several of us get together to buy a Canon, but that
probably is only sensible for some of us in the same geographic area.
Anyone else in Silly Valley interested?
6:01 a.m.
New subject: Scanning microfiche
I couldn't find anything on photo negative scanners, but with a diligent
search, who knows? I'm sure they are less costly than high-resolution
scanners, and large-format scanners, and, since the photo-neg scanners are
intended for handling small negatives, they probably yield high enough
resolution to be useful. You might get more than one of the -.15 x 0.2"
images in a single pass, but these guys produce on the order of 100-200
lines per mm. That might get you into the ballpark.
The trick of farming the work out seems like the best solution, however. at
7 cents per sheet, reduced to a TIFF on a CD, it's all ready for archival,
provided you give appropriate instructions.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Smith <eric(a)brouhaha.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 29, 2000 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: Scanning microfiche
Clint Wolff wrote:
http://www.minoltausa.com/mainframe.asp?productID=343&whichProductSecti…
whichSection=3
I am looking into the same problem, and the only
solution I have
found that seems reasonable is a microfiche scanner. You can get
a used Minolta MS-1000 (not Y2K compliant) with a proprietary
PC interface card for ~$2000 (US$). A new MS-2000 with a SCSI
interface has a retail price of ~$6000.
I found MS 2000 info here:
The more expensive Canon that I mentioned in a previous post will do 600
DPI
and it can handle B-size (11x17 inch effective)
documents, useful for
maintenance prints, but otherwise it seems similar.
I might suggest that several of us get together to buy a Canon, but that
probably is only sensible for some of us in the same geographic area.
Anyone else in Silly Valley interested?
6:10 a.m.
New subject: Scanning microfiche
On Sat, Jul 29, 2000 at 05:52:11PM -0000, Eric Smith (eric(a)brouhaha.com) wrote:
Clint Wolff wrote:
Before you do that, it'd be worthwhile to drop a line to University
archivists and librarians in your area -- often, universities already
have this sort of equipment, and in my experience (at Canadian public
universities, mind you), they're usually open to letting one use that
sort of thing if it's for private purposes and it's not going to take
away from the work that's *supposed* to be done on it (ie, expect to
have to wait until it's sitting idle, or possibly get interrupted
occasionally when library work needs to be done).
-Rich
--
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
Concordia University, Montreal, QC (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich(a)alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------
I am looking into the same problem, and the only
solution I have
found that seems reasonable is a microfiche scanner. You can get
a used Minolta MS-1000 (not Y2K compliant) with a proprietary
PC interface card for ~$2000 (US$). A new MS-2000 with a SCSI
interface has a retail price of ~$6000.
I found MS 2000 info here:
http://www.minoltausa.com/mainframe.asp?productID=343&whichProductSecti…
The more expensive Canon that I mentioned in a previous post will do 600 DPI
and it can handle B-size (11x17 inch effective) documents, useful for
maintenance prints, but otherwise it seems similar.
I might suggest that several of us get together to buy a Canon, but that
probably is only sensible for some of us in the same geographic area.
Anyone else in Silly Valley interested? 
5:43 a.m.
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:
Do what I did and send it to a shop that specializes in scanning
microfiche. .07/page and it comes back on CD-ROM in TIFF files.
--Chuck
8 a.m.
Upon the date 10:43 AM 7/29/00 -0700, Chuck McManis said something like:
At 08:05 AM 7/29/00 -0400, you wrote:
What type of shop, Chuck? Kwik Kopy or some such? I've got several sheets
of non-computer related fiche I'd like to get printed sometime and plopped
onto a CD-ROM.
As for the $0.07 per page, maybe Tim should indeed buy his own scan/copying
machine for many thousands of bucks. A quick cipher based on Tim's
hypothetical scenario ("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.") yields a cost of ~$28k. Whew! Hmmm, he could buy a nice small
car plus several years worth of gasoline for that money and drive to the
library any time he wanted to view them <bg>.
Interesting thread.
Regards, Chris
-- --
Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian
Jamestown, NY USA cfandt(a)netsync.net
Member of Antique Wireless Association
URL: http://www.antiquewireless.org/
Not so much related to classic hardware directly,
but instead the
*documentation* for classic hardware *and* software:
Do what I did and send it to a shop that specializes in scanning
microfiche. .07/page and it comes back on CD-ROM in TIFF files.
8:38 a.m.
At 04:00 PM 7/29/00 -0400, Chris wrote:
What type of shop, Chuck? Kwik Kopy or some such?
I've got several sheets
of non-computer related fiche I'd like to get printed sometime and plopped
onto a CD-ROM.
I looked up 'fiche printing' on Google, got the name of one shop who was
shutting down the operation and he referred me to this other shop. I had
them print out the KA660 CPU Tech manual for me. I can't say as I actually
recommend them however as they took a long time to do it, got it wrong the
first time, and complained about making it right the second time.
As for the $0.07 per page, maybe Tim should indeed buy
his own scan/copying
machine for many thousands of bucks.
I would certainly kick in $1K toward such a project. My experience is that
you _have_ to have an auto scanner, this move/frame/press stuff is just too
hard to keep your brain focussed.
--Chuck
10:34 a.m.
Chuck McManis <cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com>
I would certainly kick in $1K toward such a project.
My experience is that
you _have_ to have an auto scanner, this move/frame/press stuff is just too
hard to keep your brain focussed.
From the specs, the Canon appears to support automatic
operation, as well
as manual.
10:17 a.m.
Chris has hit the nail squarely on the head, and driven it clean
through the board, although his calculations are off... Most of
the fiche I have are between 20-50 images each, and I have LOTS.
I haven't ever done a count, but I estimate around 4000.
So, 4000 fiche * 25 pages per (easy math) = 100000 pages = $7000
I can buy a scanner for that, and rent it out to all the other
wackos who collect antique ficheys when I'm done :)
clint
PS I'm in colorful Colorado...
On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, Christian Fandt wrote:
Upon the date 10:43 AM 7/29/00 -0700, Chuck McManis
said something like:
At 08:05 AM 7/29/00 -0400, you wrote:
Do what I did and send it to a shop that specializes in scanning
microfiche. .07/page and it comes back on CD-ROM in TIFF files.
What type of shop, Chuck? Kwik Kopy or some such? I've got several sheets
of non-computer related fiche I'd like to get printed sometime and plopped
onto a CD-ROM.
As for the $0.07 per page, maybe Tim should indeed buy his own scan/copying
machine for many thousands of bucks. A quick cipher based on Tim's
hypothetical scenario ("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.") yields a cost of ~$28k. Whew! Hmmm, he could buy a nice small
car plus several years worth of gasoline for that money and drive to the
library any time he wanted to view them <bg>.
Interesting thread.
Regards, Chris
-- --
Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian
Jamestown, NY USA cfandt(a)netsync.net
Member of Antique Wireless Association
URL: http://www.antiquewireless.org/
5:45 a.m.
Tim wrote:
Each 8.5" x 11" printed page on the
microfiche is about 0.15" x 0.2",
so the magnification factor is about 50.
Yup, standard magnifications are 24, 42, and 48.
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.
It's worse than that. The high resolutions they quote are *interpolated*.
Usually the real resolution (which they call "optical resolution") is
no more than 600 DPI, or sometimes even 300. A few scanners can do 1200 DPI
optical on one axis.
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.
Talk to Al Kossow. Having looked at a lot of DEC field service fiche, I
didn't expect that anything under 300 DPI effective would even be reasonable
to look at, much less to OCR. He thought 200 DPI effective might be OK.
He sent a few samples off to a service bureau in southern CA, and they
scanned them at several effective resolutions including 200 and 300 DPI.
The 200 DPI scans were basically worthless. The conclusion was that
it really needed *400* DPI effective.
If you save greyscale data, 200 or 300 DPI effective might be OK. But
greyscale doesn't compress anywhere near as well as bilevel (using either
Group 4 fax compression [*], or JBIG [**]).
The service bureau charges around $0.07 per page (not per sheet of fiche)
to do this. They seem to miss a lot of pages in the process, so I assume
that they do NOT use a method that scans the entire fiche, but rather a
step-and-repeat sort of process.
Canon makes a fiche viewer/scanner for about $10K:
http://www.usa.canon.com/corpoffice/imagefilingsystems/ms800.html
I've seen a similar product from another company, but it was a bolt-on
attachment to a user-supplied fiche viewer, and it still cost about $10K.
For that money I'd rather have the Canon since it was designed from the
ground up to be a scanner.
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.
The only way to do a good job of it in bulk would be a drum scanner with
a resolution of at least 14400 DPI (300 DPI effective), and preferrably
near 19200 DPI (400 DPI effective). I've seen 15000 DPI drum scanners
for around $50,000; I've never found any that can do 15000 DPI.
Finally, do *any* scanners have documented interfaces?
i.e. say I
find myself a nice SCSI-connected high-speed high-resolution scanner.
Not many. A lot of them use the SCSI 2 scanner commands, but with
undocumented extensions.
High end professional scanners usually have a dedicated PCI interface
card.
Eric
[*] The nice thing about G4 is that not only does it do very good
compression, but it's also lossless, so it doesn't have unpleasant
fringing and smearing effects like JPEG. I still can't believe that
people try to use JPEG for text and line art, it's a bloody STUPID thing
to do. JPEG is designed for CONTINUOUS TONE IMAGES. Oh well, don't get
me started on that, I could rant for hours.
The bad news about G4 is that most people don't have software that can
process raw G4 files, or TIFF Class F G4 files. People will try to claim
that your TIFF files are broken. The good news is that G4 is a native
Acrobat compression format, so you can supply PDF files that will work for
everyone. That's how I supply all my scanned documents now.
I still get complaints from a few people that they can't read my PDF
files on their PDP-11/05 or Commodore 64. I ignore those people. I
like old computers as much as anyone, but I don't expect to view 300 DPI
scanned images on a computer with 64K of RAM and a low resolution
display. I have more modern computers for that.
[**] JBIG is also lossless and typically compresses 10-15% better than
G4. Unfortunately it's patented and not widely supported.
31 Jul
31 Jul
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.
8680
days inactive
8682
days old
11 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
cfandt＠netsync.net -
CLASSICCMP＠trailing-edge.com -
cmcmanis＠mcmanis.com -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
rich＠alcor.concordia.ca -
richard＠idcomm.com -
rigdonj＠intellistar.net -
vaxman＠uswest.net