On thing is that I am looking at upgrading from my Epson V30 to something faster. I have not had any problems with the Epson and the image quality has been very good.

Plustek has a few that look very interesting with the scanning area being very close to the edge of the scanner housing, thus making it easier to scan the magazines.

The OpticBook A300 can perform 12×17 scans and the specs say it is very fast but it is out of my price range.
The OpticBook 4800 is only letter size but, specs-wise, is much faster than the Epson.
The OpticBook 3600 still has the near-edge scanning capability but is half as fast as the 4800. And half the price.

Are there any other scanners that I should consider? If you have a thought, feel free to send me a note!

Cheers!

I am getting more comfortable with FineReader, too. The “Erase” feature works quite nicely for erasing the edges of the pages using a blend technique. I also used it to quickly straighten some of the pages, although being an “automatic” function, it didn’t want to mess with places that were only slightly skewed. My preference would be able to more fine control over the process. Another plus is that the OCR takes advantage of multiple CPU cores. All in all, FineReader is shaping up quite nicely.

Check out and enjoy the June 1978 issue. And if you compare it with another issue I’ve posted, let me know what you think. Is it quality difference worth it considering it saves me hours of processing?

I just scanned a page from Kilobaud in VueScan and couldn’t get the page straight. No matter how precisely I placed the page, it came up crooked. Grrrrr…

Out comes the ruler! Guess what? The page was printed crooked and too close to binding! So if a page in the archive looks crooked, it wasn’t me!

The kicker is that this is a VERY time consuming process. Therefore, in the interest in time and general archival needs, I’m going to do things differently.

First, I’ve spent a good deal of time with VueScan (www.hamrick.com) to tweak the original image without destroying the quality. Sure, I use the supplied TWAIN drivers for convenience as that is what a lot of software supports. When I need the best scans possible, I use VueScan. I am always impressed how much more VueScan brings out and lets me dial in the image and it has impressed me again.

The result is that I’ve made a profile that makes the original scans look pretty decent. There will still be pages that show human error, those that are not aligned perfectly and show the edges of the paper, and the paper will still have some “character,” but it is be quite usable. After scanning a magazine, I’ll post it raw at either 150 or 200 dpi to “get it out there.” I keep the originals so that later I can optimize each image and then post those at 200 dpi.

So what about the 300 dpi originals? I’ll keep them separate. Think of them as the RAW originals.

Well, it’s back to work. Enjoy the Kilobauds! And don’t forget to check out VueScan for yourself.

Of special note is that I have, with permission, placed the first Kilobaud Microcomputing magazine in the archive. I scanned the pages at 300 dpi and cleaned up each by hand as the old paper posed a few challenges. The copy I posted is 150 dpi and more highly compressed, roughly 50 pages per PDF. I will retain the originals so they can be published at a greater resolution or perhaps using a “flipping” page viewer in the future.

Let me know what you think.

I could almost write this up as a history lesson, using a single-core processor with 512 MB RAM and a 120 GB hard drive again…

As a background, they have been a book dealer since the 1980′s and have dealing with older computer materials for about 10 years. I would suggest checking back periodically as they are still building their site presently having only a part of their books and journals cataloged online. Also, if you are looking for something in particular to send them an email and ask!

Thanks, Anne!