Quality of the scanner

I tried hard to make the scanned images as good as possible. Resolution limit should be the quality of the fiches itself, not any property of my scanning rig.

Here is a typical image of a single fiche frame, as photographed from the readers screen with the DSLR:

fiche normal full

Normally the scan quality is very good:

fiche nice detail

good and blue

fiche nice2 detail

good and green

 

Galerie of flaws

However, often the quality of the fiches itself was problematic. Problems can occur on every stage in a fiches live:

  • the original document is ill formatted
  • the original printout is bad
  • the printout is not correctly transferred to the fiche
  • the fiche is over or underexposured
  • the fiche film itself is varying in color and base brightness
  • the fiche is damaged while in use
  • the fiche disintegrates while in collectors stock for years.

See here some typical flaws:

fiche acid detail

Decay

fiche holes detail

User: physical damages

fiche bright detail

Film:  too bright

fiche overexposure detail

Film: totally over-exposured

fiche dark detail

Film: too dark

fiche verydark detail

Film: much too dark

fiche printer detail

Printer: original from teletype?

fiche printquality detail

Printer: out of ink?

fiche production dirt detail

Production: dirty original

fiche snow detail

Production: strange noise

fiche resolution detail

Bad resolution for schematics

fiche scratches detail

Use: scratches

After raw scan, the images are run through a processing chain of image filters. These filter must be intelligent enough to handle all the various anomalies shown above!