Subject: Re: DEC RL02 anyone need one?

From: Al Kossow <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jun 3 16:11:58 2003

Can you scan fiche yet?

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No, that project is probably not going to happen this year.
Too many other things going on right now.

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From: Kevin Handy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jun 3 16:12:26 2003

>Can you scan fiche yet?
What kind of resolution is necessary for scanning microfiche?

2400dpi scanners are becomming moderately cheap and common,
capable of scanning negitives, but is this enough density for a
readable copy from microfiche? iirc. a page is about 1/4" on the
fiche (or am I remembering wrong? Haven't held fiche in years),
which would give you (.25 * 2400) = 600bits/wide.  Assuming
it's from an 8-1/2" sheet, (600 / 8.5) = 70, which would come to
about 70 dpi relative scan density. A little low for OCR, but is
it readable?

If you need larger size, how hard would it be to project a
microfiche image onto a sheet, and to scan that?
You shouldn't need to make a single page image much
larger than a 1" wide to get something scannable.
(2400 * 1")/8.5 = 282 dpi equivelent. Probably good enough
for OCR if it's not to blurry.

Just thinking strange ideas. Wish I had some fiche to try.

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From: "John Allain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jun 5 08:31:42 2003

> Just thinking strange ideas. Wish I had some fiche to try.

For non-paper applications I heartily reccomend a digital
camera.  I often "scan" things at effective 300 and 600 dpi
by photographing them first and then resampling from grayscale
to B&W.  I hope it's obvious that a camera is the best way to
digitize a projected image.

John A.

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From: Mike Ford <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Jun 6 14:27:12 2003

>camera.  I often "scan" things at effective 300 and 600 dpi

Two essentials for this to work are, decent lights, and a tripod of some kind.