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(re: Kinko’s scanning)
I have a feeling we have more than 20 magazines, especially if we want to also scan extraneous material, never mind the old newsletters as well. Anyway, if you remember I projected 10 megs an issue of ‘readable’ quality when we considered uploading them to this site. So if we have 2 CDs to work with (and thus can probably go larger than 10 megs per issue), the quality would be reasonable – for on screen reading, at least. I’m not sure about printing.
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(re: re: Kinko’s scanning) My recollection is that the magazines were 64 pages.
With 20 issues, there are approximately 1,280 pages to be scanned
At 500k per image, this is approximiately, 620 megabytes – or, 1 full cd
Is my math correct?
I’m guessing Kinkos would charge $1 to $2 per page to do the scanning. At 500k per page, the quality can be pretty good.
-Ken W -
(re: re: re: Kinko’s scanning) Ok, for all parties interested, sit down and get ready for some numbers.
I contacted Kinko’s earlier this week – spoke to a really nice fellow – names Robert. I told Robert the following:
Archiving project – magazines
About 50 magazines, 50 pages each (2500 pages)
Historical stuff – need to be real careful
He explained to me that kinko’s normally works with loose leaf paper (like legal documents) for scanning. This particular job would require hand placement (they ain’t cutting up my mags!), since they could not feed it through a document feeder. This particular Kinko’s was the only on that would even consider the job – the other one I called said no way. Anyway here is the breakdown he gave me that the managers said they would do only cause it was high volume, (although I fail to see the discount) I guess it all boils down to the fact that they dont want to do it :
$9.95 per page (normally $15 for hand placement) 300dpi color scans
$90/hr for any descreening, color correction, blemish removal
$15 for “Setup” on each CD burned PLUS
$15 for each CD to acutally burn and label it.
I’ll do some REALLY rough math, and throw out around $30,000 for Kinko’s to do it. Any buyers? That’s what I thought. I asked how much those legal documents (loose paper) cost, and he said around $5 per.
Robert did inform me though, that he does do other printing work/document work on the side, and could quote me a much better price. He called me back in a few days and gave me his low-down as follows :
$4.00 per page
That includes descreening, color correction (for yellowing pages), blemish removal, and 300 dpi images burned on a CD-ROM, firewire drive, or whatever we wanted. He also said he would do some tests up front to show us his work. I asked about insurance on the magazines.. he is covered.
Ken, we are still looking at $10,000 even at the reduced rate. I am pretty positive that there are around 50 magazines – I own around 35 of them, and if you fill in the blanks (with a few unknowns) you get around 50. The earlier mags have around 30 pages, the later ones around 65. So I think 2,500 pages is a good estimate.
For this project, I personally want 300dpi, 8.5×11, 24bit, UNCOMPRESSED images. I want these archived perfectly. If you do the math with those numbers you get the following :
25,245,000 bytes per image (24,653K)
2500 pages = 58.7GB
27 pages per CD-R ///// would take 93 CD’s
178 pages per DVD-R ///// would take 15 DVD’s300dpi scans saved at low JPG resolution look great. Around 500k page = 25MB per issue. I printed some tests out on a HP Color Laser printer – looked great. 50 issues would be 2 CD’s worth.. and essentially anyone could print out a “magazine” on a nice printer. Further testing is needed to find the optimum trade off’s but that is what I have found so far.
Photoshop files use a lossless compression, and store a theortical 25,245,000 byte file depending on the complexity around 15MB. So you you could save potentially around 40% in storage space.
If I was to scan 20 pages a night it would take me around 125 days to scan them. Ok, I am through with the numbers for now – I can keep breaking it down a billion ways. Basically I just wanted to get the numbers from Kinko’s in front of you Ken. Robert said he could have them done in 3 weeks.
This is going to be a worthwhile project folks, and not JUST the magazine archiving. I am organizing some online stuff, to officially kick off the project – and get those who REALLY want to be involved : involved. So stay tuned.
Talk to you all later.
-Brad -
(re: re: re: re: Kinko’s scanning) Some BIG numbers there 🙂 I’d agree that the ‘master’ scan resolution should be as stated – an uncompressed 300dpi image. This should be used as the source for ‘corrections’, after which the image may be compressed (preferably losslessly) and archived to the media (CD/DVD).
We’ve a couple of choices when it comes to storage…. My initial thoughts concerning image size were to store the images compressed (ZIP like) per issue on the media. These would be unpacked by the menu system into a simple ‘book reader viewer’. The book reader would have facilities to export the uncompressed version, printing, etc.
Obviously the above would need some code writing and there would need to be some debate about what platforms it should support! I’d want to limit my involvement (should anyone want me to do anything!) to a Windows platform. -
(re: re: re: re: re: Kinko’s scanning) Can someone scan ONE image, as a 500k image – at a resolution of approximately 800×1200
I’m curious to see how it looks.
My feeling is that if the final result requires more than 1 or 2 CDs, it becomes impractical to sell the CDs, and the market for the CDs evaporates.
On the price issue: I don’t think there are as many issues as some think. My guess is that we can only come up with 20-30 issues. I also think we can negotiate a deal with Kinkos, or some other similar company.
If we make this a huge complex project, it will not get done.
-Ken W -
(re: re: re: re: re: re: re: Kinko’s scanning) Brad:
Here’s the picture you uploaded, as a 387k image. At this quality, all the magazines should fit a single CD.
-Ken W
PS I’m not sure what magazines I have. I’m in Florida now, and won’t be back home in Seattle for another couple of weeks. When I get home I’ll look to see. I remember that my brother once gave me a full set. They were in my bookcase when we moved — which could mean anything. I have LOTS of boxes to sort through looking for them. -
(re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: Kinko’s scanning) For reference of this size/quality issue, I got a copy of the Totally MAD collection, which contains high-res scans of every single issue of the original MAD Magazine between 1952 and 1998 along with a lot of side-material like sound and video clips and various wacky things (if you’ve ever read MAD I think you get the idea). Everything is packaged within a nice and funny user interface. It is produced by Broderbund. Hey, that’s your old buddies Ken! 😉
Anyway, this collection is 7 CD’s big. The total number of scanned magazines on them are 509, plus a dozen or two special editions. If we omit for a moment the fact that there is lots of extra material on the CD’s, this makes an average of approximately 73 issues per CD. A very rough estimate would be that the average MAD issue contains about 40 pages. That’s almost 3000 pages per CD! So, the quality must be pretty bad you say. On the contrary! There is a feature to send a page to the clipboard, and you get a crisp 24-bit picture with the resolution 1110 x 1626 pixels. Many of the pages are in black and white though, as they were printed in the magazine. But even though this makes it possible to reduce their byte size by at least half (I don’t know if that’s how they’re stored since you still get a color image if you copy such a page to the clipboard) there is no doubt that it’s possible to get lots of scans on a CD at high quality. I didn’t manage to figure out exactly what format the scans are in (PDF?), although I know from analysis of them that the images are definately stored in the regular sequential format defined by CCITT for JPEG images, with 8 x 8 DCT-coded blocks. So there’s no secret super-effective image compression at work here or anything. Apart from the scans themselves, the viewing software allows you to search throughout the entire archive with great precision. If you know a word related to a specific article in some MAD Magazine you remember from somewhere, your chances of finding it immediately are great. This is my own experience anyway. The software has lots of nice features to use with the material, such as the option to interact with those famous fold-in back covers. 🙂
For copyright reasons, I cannot post you one of the scans for demonstration, but I did a little experiment (that you can easily repeat yourself), taking that 2.5 mb scan you posted Brad and reduced its size to the Totally MAD dimensions (actually, those scans have a black border where the paper ends around them so I got a slightly bigger page with your picture) and saved it in standard JPEG format, with 15% compression. The result was quite pleasing, with all images and text practically as good as on paper (and almost twice the size on my 19inch screen) with a file size of 326k. With 800 megabytes you would be able to fit 2512 such JPEG pictures. If every magazine had 40 pages (I’m just guessing here) you would fit at least 62 magazines on 800mb at that quality. For the convenience of having everything on one CD I think this quality is perfectly acceptable. I am all for extra care right from the beginning when doing a project like this so you guys could very well keep scans of much higher quality on your own, but these calculations made me confident that 1 CD is enough to get something that people will be happy with.
For whatever this is worth, the Totally MAD archival project was far more ambitious than this consiering the immense amount of material they had to go through, so it’s reasonable to assume that they did some proper research on what quality/size ratio was acceptable, and it translates very well into this project. Seriously, there is nothing to complain about regarding the quality of these MAD magazine scans and if my calculations holds, it would probably be possible to squeeze in even a bit more quality than they did and still make it all fit on one CD. -
(re: re: re: Kinko’s scanning) Basically there is nothing stopping me from starting to scan them right now, I guess I am just waiting for Ken to say yea or nea on the budget for an external company. Ken when did you think you would be back home again?
I should be back in Seattle on Oct 22nd, and will look then to see what I have.
On the budget side: I’ll kick in up to $2,000 on the project – which doesn’t need repaid. Do we have someone who is interested in “marketing” the CDs at a reasonable cost – so that the rest of us can count on being able to obtain them?. I don’t think we’ll sell a lot of them – but it wouldn’t surprise me if we move a few hundred over the next year or two.
-Ken W -
Brad:
I’ll check to see what I have. I think I have some of the “really old” issues.
Can you imagine how big this will all be after it is scanned? Let’s say that we reduce each page to 500K (decent quality). One magazine would be 64 pages, or 32 megabytes. Actually, that’s not too bad. I can find the room on this site for that.
-Ken W -
(re: Size / Format Discussion) Just wondering if anyone has thought of doing this in .pdf format? It would be easy to read and the colors/resolution is wonderful. Shipping etc would be cheaper on a CD too.
Look at NASA’s CAIB report to see what I meanLink: http://www.caib.us(http://www.caib.us)
Just an idea
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