The answer is: Mekel 460XL Microfiche scanner

From: Antonio Carlini <Antonio.Carlini_at_riverstonenet.com>
Date: Fri May 10 04:54:05 2002

>There are approximately 400 fiche/ft and 100 11x17 images
>per fiche or 200 8.5x11 images per fiche.

So that's maybe 320,000 US Letter size pages.
Assuming 70KB/page, I make that 21GB
or 30-ish CD-ROMs (or a mere 5 DVDs, if
they're cheaper over there these
days).

Assuming a scan time of 10s per page,
you will need over 37 days of scan
time to get all the data (I'm guessing
you can run it in unattended mode...)

I assume you are going to make this
available on a web page or two, I
think I can download it all in just
about 60 hours. Looks good to me :-)

>it. The plan is TIFF with G4 compression which works out
>to be half the size of an equivalent PDF and can be converted

I think if you PDF stuff that has been G4'd
you'll find that the size increase is minimal.
Stuff I've scanned comes out of the
scanner as PDF but *not* G4 compression,
that's why it's a little bigger.

>to PDF by the consumer if desired. I haven't found a good
>way to convert a PDF back into a TIF... We shall see
>how good the process works...

I believe that Acrobat 5 can go from PDF to other
stuff, but I think we only have V4 kicking
around, so I cannot check.

No problem - just supply TIFFs and I'll happily
turn them into PDFs myslef (just this once,
you understand :-) )

Seriously, if this works, I'll dig out my
four linear mm of fiche and send them
over (always assuming they're not already
in your stack).

Antonio
Received on Fri May 10 2002 - 04:54:05 BST