Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Digitizing Microfiche: Managing Expectations

The process of digitizing microfiche offers challenging situation for many operators. Depending on the quality of the source microfiche and the scanning equipment in use, the image output can differ from situations.

Even with the latest microfiche scanning technology from NextScan, some people have different expectations about image output. Transferring microfiche to digital images is a mass production process, and generally at 200-300DPI and using the different scanning software algorithms like edge enhancement, deskeckle, deskew, autocropping, smooth, and gamma correction should create a usable product. For poor quality images, greyscale images can be created (4-bit, 8-bit, LZW, JPEG etc.) However, if the jacket fiche or COM fiche is not ideal an exact duplication from fiche to image is not realistic.

In order to achieve the best possible quality in any situation, it is best if the microfiche conversion process  is performed by a professional operator. This would be someone with many years of experience using various equipment that has converted similar microfiche with similar quality standards.

Putting microfiche in an Eyecom fiche reader or making individual manual adjustments on a Cannon reader printer is 100% different than microfiche scanning using a NextScan microfiche scanner or other systems.

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Anthony Ferrar Scanning Depot admin@scanningdepot.com 786-227-3042
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