Dear Sandy,
I've used a scanner but it was not exactly straightforward.
Scanners work very well with color films but not as well with b/w
films. The reason seems to be that the color films are all transparent while
the b/w are an agglomerate of very small crystals, some transparent some
opaque. This may create interference problems with the discrete structure of
the CCD device in the scanners.
The first attempts I did with my high resolution scanner (bought
just for this job) were discouraging. I put the film parallel to the long
side of the A4 plane because this gave me the possibility to scan many
photograms at once. Unfortunately in 95% of the cases what I got was a
totally black image or one cluttered with very dark parallel stripes. In the
other 5% of the cases I got a perfect image. It seemed to depend on the
position of the film on the plane. I guess the interference was really the
reason for this. Of course it was impossible to scan a whole microfilm with
a single good scan in 2-3 afternoons.
Fortunately I've got the solution from my friend lutenist Gianluca
which had managed to scan the films before. He used to scan putting the film
parallel to the short side of the plane so parallel to the moving device of
the scanner. It worked very well for me too even if I had to scan a single
page at once.
Francesco
> In the old days (70s) one could take a roll of microfilm to
> your local xerox shop and for a tidy sum they would print it
> all out and even bind it for you, and presto, your own facsimile.
> What do people do today? I have heard that some scanners
> allow you to scan it in and then print it out, but they all
> seem to just do single slides.
> The only microfilm to paper machines I have found are very expensive.
> All suggestions much appreciated. Thank you.
>
> Sandy
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