Message-Id: <199906090644.XAA47382@dns.ccit.arizona.edu> Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 02:42:32 -0400 From: Larry Wentzel <mailto:lrw5@PSU.EDU> Subject: Re: Minolta PS7000 To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
At 02:54 PM 6/8/99 -0400, Eileen Mathias wrote: >We recently purchased the Minolta PS7000 and have been using it for about a
>month now. For our purposes, it has worked well. We have many rare and
>fragile books, and purchased the Minolta because our books receive a lot of
>use, and people are constantly asking for photocopies.
We have also used the Minolta scanner for this purpose -- creating photocopies of rare and fragile books for patrons (although we are using the PS3000). The quality is not archival, but it serves the patrons' needs and eliminates the page curl problem. For one rare book that gets frequent use, we scanned it in its entirety, bound the printout, and set it out as a service copy of the original. The Minolta does a fairly decent job of reproducing the text, handwriting, diacritical marks, and marks of the page (in black and white/grayscale) for most patrons.
>The Minolta has a metal piece off which the book reflects its
>height and size to the camera. This metal piece was visibly marred on
>ours, which may have caused some of the problems of reading the height of
>the book.
This piece can also be scuffed from book covers repeatedly being flipped. To date, I haven't noticed this affecting the performance of the scanner, but scuffing does occur.
The one other thing I've noticed is that the page curl correction can be flighty. Sometimes you can get two different scans of the page, without having adjusted the page in any way. This is a minor problem with the PS3000 which may have been corrected in the 7000.
One of the motivating factors for our purchase of the Minolta scanner was that it allows our Interlibrary Loan department to scan page/article requests of tightly bound books and send the pages through ARIEL.
--Larry Wentzel --Preservation Digital Scanning Technician --Penn State University Libraries