hard drive – Generation Imaging

October 20, 2011

What Are Microfilm Scanning Services?

At the most basic level, microfilm scanning services refers to digitizing roll film. In other words, it is the transfer from analog media to digital format. To break it down even further, it is roll film to tiff, pdf, jpeg, or other image format. The two types of roll film are 16mm and 35mm, not to be confused with movie film.

So in addition to the actual roll film conversion, is another component of microfilm scanning services?

Quality control. Some companies don’t actually check their work, or simply do a quick spot check before sending the project out. What happens is that he burden would get put on you to perform your own in-depth quality check. If you don’t have time or labor to perform a check, there would be a great chance that the images are incorrect, which is a nightmare. Generation Imaging performs four phases of quality control, which are including in our standard microfilm scanning services.

Phase 1: Generation Imaging’s scanner operators actually check their work during scanning. They check their settings. As a failsafe, each project has a project manager and supervisor to verify that the microfilm machines and specifications are correct.
Phase 2: Another worker or workers will audit the scan. The scanner will create a ribbon of the entire roll, and the auditor will manually verify, modify, and- if necessary- adjust quality or rescan the roll.
Phase 3: This is an intense quality control process that meets industry standards. It is performed by a separate quality control team. A significant percentage of images is checked. 100% QC and/or manually adjusting or manually cropping or manually splitting images are add-on microfilm scanning services.
Phase 4: The CD, DVD, or hard drive is checked and image counts are matched.

As you can see there is more to microfilm scanning services than just hanging a roll on the machine.

September 13, 2009

Microfilm Scanning Quality

When performing a microfilm scan, there are many issues that need to be considered to assure that the resulting quality is the best possible scan.

To start, you need to determine how much information you want to capture from the film. At first, this may seem to many like a dumb question, thinking that the more the better. In many instances that is the case, but there is a limit to this benefit and at one point there is a cost to pay that counteracts some of the benefit.

The two question to answer before starting the microfilm conversion process with respect to ultimate quality are Film Scan Resolution and File Type.

The film scan resolution is often refer to as DPI or “dots per inch”. The DPI is important because it determines the size of the dots or points that make up an image. If you look at a one inch by one inch square of an image and zoom in on it so that you could see the dots that make an image, you would be able to see rows of dots that change color. A resolution of 100 would have 100 dots going across the one inch. A 300 DPI image would have 300 dots in this same row. To fit more dots in the same distance, they would have to be smaller and more compact. More dots means that the image would have better chances of been higher quality.

More dots also means that there is more information. More information also means that the image is bigger in terms of file size. This is the down side to a higher DPI. End users are sometimes affected by this issue for a couple of reasons. One is the hard drive space that will be needed to store the images. If the project is large, the difference in drive space may be significant. The second issue has to do with the end users system and its ability to handle the images quickly. The larger the files are, the more information the system needs to process. If going with larger DPI, the end user needs to make sure that the operating system, the processor in the computer, the network, and all other components, are ready to deal with the larger images and can achieve the desired results.

In addition to the DPI scan resolution, determining the file type is also important. There are various image types, including gray scale, j-peg, tiff, and others, and some various compression types withing these selections. Grey scale images offer the possibility of generating very high quality images with lots of details but it is usually much higher in file size.

CONTACT GENERATION IMAGING FOR MORE INFORMATION