Advantages and disadvantages of special scanners for microfilms

I want to scan microfilm with text of book. I need to make order for scanning with especial scanner or to scan with usual filmscanner Primefilm 3650U for free. Please inform me, what are the advantages and disadvantages of special scanner versus filmscanners,, including Primefilm? I want to have text in Word, which is almost equal or equal to the original and can be read and edited normally.

Welcome to Photrio, @algusev2017 !

The Primefilm 3650U scanner effectively scans at around 2600dpi according to this website: https://www.filmscanner.info/en/ReflectaIScan3600.html
Whether this is sufficient for your purposes depends on the actual nature of the microfilm images that are being digitized. It's also hard to tell if this scanner will be better or worse if the alternative is now known.

algusev2017 said:

I want to have text in Word

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You may want to look into 'OCR', which is what's needed to turn a scanned image of text into editable text. This tends to work better with high-resolution scans.

Is there any additional information on the microfilm images and the scanning options that are available to you?

Some OCR software (optical character recognition) is better than others. If microfilm is clean and you get a good scan, the software will make fewer mistakes. But the quality of the OCR software may be more important than the quality of the scan. If the microfilm is dirty, expect a lot of errors.

koraks said:

Welcome to Photrio, @algusev2017 !

The Primefilm 3650U scanner effectively scans at around 2600dpi according to this website: https://www.filmscanner.info/en/ReflectaIScan3600.html
Whether this is sufficient for your purposes depends on the actual nature of the microfilm images that are being digitized. It's also hard to tell if this scanner will be better or worse if the alternative is now known.



You may want to look into 'OCR', which is what's needed to turn a scanned image of text into editable text. This tends to work better with high-resolution scans.

Is there any additional information on the microfilm images and the scanning options that are available to you?

Click to expand...

Thanks, I tried only Primefilm now with 3600 dpi and Vuescan software. Vuescan settings are: scan as positive, improve sharpness, strong infrared cleaning . The result is readable. Its screenshot is attached. The full file can be downloaded from here. But there are a lot of errors, when recognizing with Finereader. As for other scanning options, I search them now. I changed Vuescan settings, There were no essential imrovement.

runswithsizzers said:

Some OCR software (optical character recognition) is better than others. If microfilm is clean and you get a good scan, the software will make fewer mistakes. But the quality of the OCR software may be more important than the quality of the scan.

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I found out much of this myself, recently. Another big factor is the font of the text. OCR does a much better job with some fonts than others -- and I can't seem to find out anything about what fonts the OCR software programs "like".

Some fonts basically can't be read at all. My advise would be to start out with a lot of research. Then try the least expensive approach -- the most expensive might not fair any better.

This edited version of your example might be marginally better for OCR:

xkaes said:

Another big factor is the font of the text. OCR does a much better job with some fonts than others -- and I can't seem to find out anything about what fonts the OCR software programs "like".

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Monospaced fonts - e.g. (typewriter) Courier - are going to be much easier to OCR. The kerning that makes text look nice and read comfortably and easily makes OCR more effective.
Also, san serif fonts will often be more easily OCR'd than serif fonts.
A font that has a nice balance between the text itself and the space around each character will be easier to OCR.
And of course, if the scanner and OCR combination has been more extensively tested with one font, that font may yield better results.
By the way, I expect that the optimization incorporated in scanners that are designated as being designed for microfilm may be more oriented to how microfilm is handled and the who the target user group is than anything special in the way of optics or scanning mechanism.

algusev2017 said:

The result is readable. Its screenshot is attached.

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Thanks for providing the example. I'm afraid that this scanner just doesn't cut it for this task and that you'll need a higher-resolution option.

One thing you might consider is photographing the microfilm with a digital camera and an appropriate macro lens and/or extension tubes. It looks like you'll need more than 1:1 magnification, which makes things a little tricky, but still possible.

koraks said:

One thing you might consider is photographing the microfilm with a digital camera

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I agree. I think the extreme contrast is creating a halo around the letters. A digital camera using a good backlight might get a cleaner result.