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Scanning old fanzines

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 11:06 pm
by Steve M
As some have said it'd be good to scan some of the old fanzines I thought I'd give it a go today. I have some very rare Oric publications. Some of these were printed on Oric plotters and then photocopied for the masses. They look OK but trying to scan them is tough.

Greyscale produces a nice readable image but I'm getting over 2Mb for a A4 page.
Black & white produces a smaller image but the pages aren't coming out clearly. This is not too bad for text but if there are programs it's not good enough.

As the mag pages I'm trying to copy are relatively clear it makes scanning early OUMs seem unfeasible. (Because they are so faint, they would need to be scanned in greyscale.)

Scanned imaged tend to come out paler than the original which is bad news. Scanning in B&W produces images with sections missing. So we either get poor results or poor results.

Any ideas ?

Steve M

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 4:24 pm
by Symoon
I guess it all depends on what you want to scan for: screen reading or paper printing.

I've always been scanning magazines at 300dpi, monochrom (also called "2 colors" - ie black&white). Also, I always use a black paper that I insert behind the page being scanned. This avoids seeing the text printed on the other side in transparency, and reinforces the contrast.

The result is a perfect (obviously) white background. 300DPI is not very easy to read on screen, but perfect once printed most of the time.
Also, saved in GIF, a page only takes between 100 and 200 KB.

Problem: photos. When there are photos, I also scan in grey levels, because the monocrhom method doesn't give good results.
And, obviously, the colour pages are scanned in colour...

So I'm mixing up to 3 methods to scan a magazine.

Some don't and directly scan in colour, but for a result of about 60MB for a magazine.

Do try the black page thing, it really improves the scan quality IMO.

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:51 pm
by Dbug
By the way, want to signal that I can host scans for magazines on the website, and they can be linked as well on the magazine page of defence force:

http://www.defence-force.org/computing/ ... /index.htm

Mag scans

Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 2:58 am
by Steve M
Dbug wrote:By the way, want to signal that I can host scans for magazines on the website, and they can be linked as well on the magazine page of defence force:

http://www.defence-force.org/computing/ ... /index.htm
Yes, I think the idea is to get the mags online, so they need to be sizes that are downloadable.

I've been using greyscale and B&W and saving as .Gifs too. B&W works most of the time but with programs it needs to be legible.

The B&W file sizes are easier to handle than greyscale so I think I'll try the black paper trick and perhaps scan at 600dpi to see if that is better.
It's the quality of the print that is causing problems.