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Digitizing Old Magazines?
"I have a lot of old video game magazines, they're nice for playing 'classic games' because a lot of classics are impossible without the manual, and hard without a magazine (the magazine obviously negates the need for a manual usually). But they'd get damaged with a flatbed scanner, and digital cameras are hard to set up right for capturing old magazines. I know that old documents are digitally archived with very high-res cameras..."
So, the question is, what is the best way to capture all the information in old magazines in digital format? Does anyone have a home-built rig taking after the angled-pair-of-scanners setup that Project Gutenburg uses?
I Use a Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus scanner.
It allows scanning a book without forcing it flat.
The scanner itself is great, but be warned, the software is infuriatingly buggy, even in the latest release. Luckily there are work-arounds.
regards ........ Zim
He's making a fair use copy.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
No, no, and futhermore, no. We're not talking about the recording industry here (although they've been continuously defeated on fair use copies, along with the video industry). We're talking about making archival/personal use copies of printed works someone already owns, a practice that's been heavily tested in various academic and related arenas.
No, you could not "easily lose that fair use argument" in a courtroom with regard to this situation. Now, if you went out and distributed copies of the material, you've broken copyright law and would be wide open to civil actions.
Should you happen to continue to assert your position on this matter, cite supporting examples in case law.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
My wife is in the same boat as you - she had lots of slides (~3000) from her parents, lots of 35mm negatives (too many to count), and a bunch of photos (again thousands) from all different formats.
I ended up buying her a Nikon Coolscan V ED for her to scan in the 35mm negatives she has and her parent's slides. She has been very happy with it. I already had an Epson 2450 flatbed scanner...
She scans the slides, photos, and negatives while working on other projects in her office. The easiest tool I found for the photos is Adobe Photoshop CS (a bit expensive, but worth every penny - you could download a trial version from Adobe.) You put as many photos as can fit on your flatbed scanner (no need to straighten them perfectly), scan the photos, and then click on File --> Automate --> Crop and Straighten Photos - this will break up all the scanned photos into individual files, arrange them so they are straight, after which you can then edit and save each one.
Someone else wrote some instructions at http://photoshop911.typepad.com/help/2006/01/automating_crop.html/
There are probably some scanners where you can feed photos in - but some of the photos we have are irreplaceable (no negatives or copies.) We would not want to see them lost due to a scanner feed malfunction.
Also, do yourself a favor, and make backups of the work that you do. You would hate to lose all that effort due to a hard drive failure.
Best of luck!