I've done similar to what Gleason is doing (and by the way, he's doing a good job and it's really
nice to see those old magazines online and available to everyone, he's a Good Guy or a White Hat in
interwebs lingo). There's no way I'd mess with a DSLR for "maw work" as I call scanning magazines.
What I did for the AES (they had 2 years of JAES that wasn't scanned for that CD-ROM collection they
put out but also weren't available as native PDF) was take their magazines (they had the binding cut
off) and fed them into the "maw" I have at the office -- a Ricoh multi-function color
copier/scanner/printer beast. I scanned them directly into Adobe Acrobat and fed them into the "maw"
one issue at a time. It took me two afternoons to do two years. Gleason's "maw" looks to be a bit
smaller than the Ricoh, but it works the same way. I assume he de-binds those old magazines (in the
case of High Fidelity, Radio &TV News and others, this involves both slicing off the spine and then
removing sharp and usually rusty staples, so once again, Gleason is a Good Guy for doing this).
I do think quality-obsessive people may have more tweaky leeway with a good modern DSLR setup. For
what I'm doing, that's all too much time and effort. I'm usually about acceptable quality and
maximum quantity in minimal available time.
To Richard's point, there is definitely a higher-quality way to do LP album cover reproductions.
But, in my opinion, 9.99 out of 10 buyers don't care. As long as the cover is a reasonable facsimile
of the original and the back liner notes are readable, they're happy. They're especially happy if
the new LP sounds better than the back-in-the-day original. Of all the markets where there are
enough customers willing to spend on a super-premium product, Japan is definitely the most obsessed
with graphic quality. They really want a beautiful object, perhaps as much as they want a beautiful
listening experience. The US and European markets seem to be more accepting of something that
closely reminds them of the original rather than a perfect graphic reproduction.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2015 8:11 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] LP and Media Imaging
> On 2015-04-06 7:31 PM, Tom Fine wrote:
>> If I were doing a higher volume of digitizing LP covers, I would
>> investigate a copy-stand and DSLR camera setup. It's doable, although
>> you need to spend the time and money to get the lighting right, which is
>> difficult with glossy covers and also it's something of a challenge to
>> uniformly illuminate a 12x12 area and have the camera pick it up as
>> such. Now that I wrote that, I'm happy once again I stuck with a flatbed
>> scanner! It may be a little cumbersome to lift the lid and line up the
>> artwork so it's square repeatedly, but once the scanning takes place, I
>> always get a highly usable image, and the process is repeatable.
>
> I am on the fence with this. I can easily do "panoramas" of album covers in two passes with my
> Brother 11x17 scanner which is surprisingly decent for the price. In fact, one stitched together
> double scan became a CD cover.
>
> However, all of the people I speak to who are doing real production work from slides to flat art
> are swearing by digital cameras and all sorts of copy stand arrangements and not scanners. One
> friend has invested in an Imacon scanner, but he also does very large format art scanning with a
> Sony camera and Zeiss macro lenses. He is a perfectionist.
>
> Also, the semi-automated book scanners use two DSLRs. Interesting that Gleason thinks his high-end
> Kodak sheet scanner is the best for his magazine/book digitization project.
> http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Scanning-for-American-Radio-History.htm
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
> --
> Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
> Aurora, Ontario, Canada 647 479 2800
> http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
> Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.
>
>
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