At 12:42 AM 6/1/00 -2300, Tony Duell wrote:
>Try to use the laser scanner block from a
>laser printer for this, together with a suitable detector). You could
>probably enlarge an area from the film, print it onto photographic paper and
>scan it with a normal flatbed scanner.
Hmm, a few messages back I was wondering if today's low-price
LED laser printers had a dense linear array of LEDs that exposed the
drum, and that this array could be used to print a matrix
to the film.
I've mentioned
http://www.paperdisk.com/ before, perhaps some
would like to revisit this technology. The problem is, laser-print
melted plastic "ink" sticks to itself, and to paper, and suffers when
the enclosing medium is out-gassing volatiles...
I like the ideas about digitizing the stream of raw disk data.
I imagine it would be possible to perform some software-based
analysis and repair, rendering previously scrogged disks readable.
Or perhaps the forensic-style recovery of erased data, reading
and averaging adjacent off-center track information.
I seem to remember a PDP guy on this list who recovers reel tape
data this way, digitizing the raw tracks and processing with
software, as opposed to relying on antique hardware methods for
decoding the stream.
I wish this technology existed for other media, too. I have several
hours of out-of-alignment video from a camcorder whose capstans
were drifting over the course of months and years. The precious
video of my young kids is now unreadable except at random when
the position of the heads happens to float into the alignment
of when that segment was recorded.
- John
Received on Thu Jun 01 2000 - 16:04:20 BST