Subject: Scanning Microfiche

From: "Zane H. Healy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jun 11 03:18:00 2003

I think it's time to revisit the ever popular topic of scanning Microfiche.  I'm in the market for a new scanner, and ran across the "Epson Perfection 3200 Photo" scanner.  I was looking at it, because it's one of a very few Firewire scanners on the market.  What really got me to thinking though, is the fact that it is a 3200x6400dpi scanner, and has a 4"x9" transparency adapter.  This has me wondering if it wouldn't work for scanning Microfiche.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the subject?

			Zane

-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| [email-masked] (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |

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From: "John Allain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jun 11 08:24:00 2003

> Does anyone have any thoughts on the subject?

Assuming an 8.5" page is fiched at 0.25" (I don't have the 
exact figure handy), then to scan it an effective 200dpi, 
you would need 6800 dpi, both dimensions, for the fiche.  
If when scanning you use a photo depth of  8,24,or 48 bits 
at the 200 dpi you can then later up the resolution to nearly 
600 dpi 2 bit printtext depth if you want to with just minimal
losses.
Your 3200 dpi scanner would work with 8.5" pages fiched
at 0.5", but I don't think there were any done like that.

John A.

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From: Norm Aleks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jun 17 11:31:01 2003

I bought an Epson photo scanner for just this purpose -- mine has a max
resolution of 2400x4800.  Although the DPI appears to be adequate, as
someone else posted, the actual execution is problematic.  One issue is
the focus plane of the scanner -- for transparencies, it's slightly above
the platen, and it's hard to get a non-mounted transparency to the correct
height.  Even when I'd position a portion of the fiche at the correct
height, the quality of the scan was below what was visible when looking at
the fiche on a cheap viewer ... it was a disappointment.  (One issue, I
believe, is that the tranparency illuminator is non-collimated.)  It's
possible to get a pretty good quality final product with a LOT of tweaking
in Photoshop, but unfortunately you can't apply the same set of tweaks to
each image -- it's all done by eye, page by page.  The bottom line is that
the transparency scanner is pretty good for slides but not so great for
fiche.

Actual fiche scanners first enlarge the image and then use a more standard 
scanning system to get an image at a "real" 200dpi or 300dpi or whatever 
it is you want.  They get really nice results.  They're also really 
expensive.  Service bureaus vary wildly in cost.  I forget the pricing but 
the best deal I found when I was looking at this more was a company in 
India that would do the scans and then mail back the original fiche along 
with a CD-ROM of the scans.

Norm

> I think it's time to revisit the ever popular topic of scanning
> Microfiche.  I'm in the market for a new scanner, and ran across the
> "Epson Perfection 3200 Photo" scanner.  I was looking at it, because
> it's one of a very few Firewire scanners on the market.  What really got
> me to thinking though, is the fact that it is a 3200x6400dpi scanner,
> and has a 4"x9" transparency adapter.  This has me wondering if it
> wouldn't work for scanning Microfiche.
>