I have thousands, tens of thousands actually, of written A5 record cards that I would like to digitise for recall on screen. I was hoping i could photograph them, and then save them to the HDD on say a <5 second turn-around per card. Is this feasable on a digital camera ? and would the file-size be prohibitive ? B/W would be perfectly acceptable in this case - is there a camera with a B/W, low res setting for output direct to PC ?? If so, a full-time week's work would do it. Thanks for responses - Peter

-- Peter Smith (psmith@zip.com.au), March 02, 1999

Answers

CONTINUED ... B/W low rez would be fine. Can a camera output this kindof file directly? I was hoping that a 5 second turnaround per shot would be feasable. Thanks for your comments -

-- Peter Smith (psmith@zip.com.au), March 02, 1999.

You don't specify if this is a personal or business project. Commercial services do this sort of thing at a reasonable price in bulk, and it should be much cheaper than trying to have your employees do it with low end equipment.

Even if you are doing it for yourself, the time & trouble really might not be worth it compared to paying a bit for a one shot deal.

Not being an Australian, I can't give you any specific vendor recommendations.

-- Jay Holovacs (holovacs@idt.net), March 02, 1999.

Thanks Jay Yep, this is for my patient consultation records. I was hoping to do it onsite so the records would be always available, but i'll check into your suggestion. Of course, I am still checking into whether its possible to do it myself - any replies welcome

-- Peter Smith (psmith@zip.com.au), March 02, 1999.

Jay's recommendation of using a service is probably the wisest choice. The Toshiba PDR-M1 & M3 and their "sister" products, the Fuji MX-500 and MX-600 do have a monochrome mode to save some space. The new Nikon CoolPix 950 does also. The excellent macro capabilities of the 950 might suit it to this usage, but it's maddening bottom-mounted memory card access panel will be a pain (you'd have to take it off the copy-stand to pull the card for downloading). Overall, you'd be best just grabbing a large number of images to a memory card, then dumping them to the host computer via a card reader. File size will depend on what you're trying to do with the images, and what image quality you'd need to have them stored with. If you're trying to record fine details, 640x480 may not be enough. The 1.5 megapixel Toshiba/Fuji cameras mentioned above make a 1.3 megabyte monochrome file, uncompressed. With compression, it would probably come out around 100K per card or so. Hope this helps, but I still suspect you'd be better off having someone else do it...

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), March 05, 1999.

Thank you Dave :) I will have a look at a city camera store tomorrow about the models you mention. The cards are about 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches , and i think that the 800 x 600 dots would be ok since i only want to bring up a screen image of the cards which are hand-written notes. I was hoping for a ~20k file size , but maybe this is too optimistic ;) Further comments are always welcome!

-- Peter Smith (psmith@zip.com.au), March 06, 1999.

Although there is a lot of info on using a camera here, you really may want to crunch your numbers and look at a document handling system and a contractor/service bureau type activity. Some of these systems may be able to scan/OCR data from the record to some data handling a little more automatically. Besides actually making the record (photo/scan, etc.) there will need to be some retrieval & recording system set up. And consider the actual handling of "tens of thousands" of records. The "scan" alone may take 5 seconds but consider also the unfiling, moving, recording data, refiling, etc. This isn't something you want to dribble through, otherwise your job set up/take down will need to be repeated and that will be a killer. You may also want to look into a rewritable CD or other more archival/permanent storage medium as well. A HDD failure would be catastrophic.

-- Craig Gillette (cgillette@thegrid.net), March 08, 1999.