On Sun, 6 Dec 1998, Zane H. Healy wrote: I don't know the answer, but I have some thoughts. There are now flatbed scanners with a separate slide/picture scan "tray" that pops out the front like a CD tray. Whether it is large enough for the fiche, I can't say. Does that stuff come in standard sizes? There is also an Artec ScanRom 4E, a miniature tray scanner (parallel port & Windows) for stuff like 4" x 6" drugstore photos. DPI is your biggest problem. Neither of these solutions exceeds 600 or 800 dpi, while with dedicated 35mm scanners, that number is supposedly the high 1,000 to the middle 2,000 per inch. Are we talking jpegs/pdfs or ocr? How low a dpi can one go? Keeping in mind that everything aimed at consumers seems to reward routine scanning at excessive dpi, one could probably live with 200 dpi, if desperate, perhaps less. Assuming that the fiche corresponds to a standard sheet of paper, then it is possible that a true scanner resolution of 600 or 800 dpi will net 75 dpi for the finished product. Not so hot but might be workable. I could suggest optically blowing it up via a photgraphic enlarger and then scanning the enlargement, but there is still the problem of cutting to fit and the whole process would be time consuming. What about projecting it from the microfiche reader (either directly or using the screen) into something like a camcorder and then capturing as stills via a live feed? I assume there is a legitimate commercial way of scanning microfiche, but I suspect it requires a significant outlay of money. -- Stephen Dauphin

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.