Micro fiches - a closer look

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:

Normally the scan quality is very good:

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:

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!