A couple of weeks ago I waxed poetic about the beauties of the microfilm/fiche scanner. Now I've discovered something quicker and often higher quality: using your digital camera to take photos of the microfilm screen.
One of the disadvantages of the microfilm scanner compared to the digital camera is speed. My best estimate is that in an hour you can take 400 digital photos or 130 scanned microfilm images. That's a substantial difference.
To do this well you will need a tripod so that you can hold the camera steady. You can get a perfectly adequate tripod for these purposes for $30, perhaps less. Or you may already own one. Then it's simple. Line up the camera so that is horizontal and facing at the microfilm screen, put your camera on the setting you use for taking photos of documents, and snap away to your heart's content.
So far I have only done this at my own university's library. There some of the staff and other patrons have just looked at me a little quizically about the tripod bag I'm carrying. It has an uncanny resemblance to a bag you might carry a gun in. No telling what the policies of other archives are about bringing in tripods, so you wouldn't want to rely on this method for reproducing material off microfilm. But a time saving tip worth knowing about if you need to reproduce microfilm images.
As always with microfilm the quality of your image will depend on the quality of the original microfilming. This varies tremendously, but the great thing about digital images of microfilm is that you can use photo editing software to alter the black-white balance to improve legibility if there are serious problems with the original microfilm copy.
Posted by eroberts at November 30, 2006 8:40 AM