Greetings!

The Baltimore Metro Area hit a new record temperature for today’s date with a high of 105 degrees. Yes — it was miserable, and we’re all hiding in the air conditioning. No break in sight, either. But just five months ago, we literally had five feet of snow piled up in the parking lot!

As I previously mentioned, we’ve had many smaller projects going in and out of the shop. As an example, this morning we scanned a 46 year-old yearbook to searchable PDF for an individual customer in New Jersey, and also processed a small historic microfilm project for a municipal customer in New Hampshire. Both jobs came out very well. The CopiBook HD 600 is *exceedingly* sharp edge-to-edge, and it really shows. Those of you considering doing work yourselves on a $99 Best Buy flatbed scanner versus sending it to us would be shocked at the difference — it is literally apples and oranges. I hope to have some hi-res samples available on the site soon to really demonstrate the machine’s capabilities. But if you want sharp, accurate images, you will be hard-pressed to beat our CopiBook HD 600.

At the ALA show, I saw the Austrian Treventus book scanning robot being marketed here in the US by Indus. Interesting concept — pros and cons to its approach. It uses two CCD sensors embedded in its “splitting wedge”and actually line-scans both sides of each page simultaneously. It probably does the best job of eliminating page curvature of any robot out there, but it’s capped at 300dpi true optical resolution, so it won’t work for true preservation-quality work. Its maximum page size is also limited, and the price tag is a bit high (as with all robots). But it seems this unit would be a monster for rapid digitization of general circulation stacks, for example.

Case studies will be up on this site soon — Santa Paula Historical Society, and John Rigby & Co., Inc., with others to follow.

– Jim