We do quite a bit of document imaging where I work (almost typed
"where I live"... ouch...). A lot of it is paper, for which they have
some cool high-speed double-sided scanners that I play with once in a
while. They also do some fiche, using something that looks like one
of us built it in his basement. It's called a "Screenscan", and it's
basically just the guts out of a flatbed scanner (just the scanning
element and mechanism) bolted to the front of a normal rear-projection
fiche/film reader. The reader has a ground-glass screen that it
projects the image onto. The operator lines up a fiche page, sets the
focus, etc, just as though they were going to view it normally, and
then hits a button. The scan bar then moves down the face of the
glass screen, capturing the image as though it were a brightly-lit
piece of paper. I would think it wouldn't be too hard to find an old
fiche/film reader and an old scanner and hack them to work this way.
The light source is provided by the reader, so you don't need the bulb
from the scanner. You might have to play with the distance between
the scan bar and the screen to get good focus, but it should work.
Now we're looking at $200,000 automated fiche scanners because we just
got in a bunch of fiche from a company we bought and it would be
cheaper to buy the equipment and do it ourselves than to farm it out.
Those ought to be fun to play with too...
>At 12:41 PM 2/15/2002 -0800, Brian Chase wrote:
>>I like the backlighter idea as well, but I've a feeling the resolution
>>wouldn't be adequate for microfiche.
>
>I've always wondered about ways to connect an ordinary
>microfiche reader to modern image capture. Why not?
>The projected image is dim. I wonder what happens when
>you scan it on a flatbed scanner whose lamp has been
>disconnected.
>
Bill Richman
bill_r_at_inetnebr.com
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r
Home of Fun with Molten Metal, technological
oddities, and the original COSMAC Elf
computer simulator!
Received on Fri Feb 15 2002 - 15:52:26 GMT