Scanning microfiche?

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_intellistar.net>
Date: Mon Jul 31 17:30:44 2000

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.
>
Received on Mon Jul 31 2000 - 17:30:44 BST