Microfiche Lens

[Hasher]

Hi guys ,

I'm a first time poster and more into genealogy than photography but I am enjoying this .

I spend more than my fair time studying microfiche in my pursuit of genealogy records and recently I wanted to start copying them into my computer. After reading many websites I made up a reversed 60mm macro lens rig with linked together extension tubes and bellows off ebay . For the time being I have borrowed a friends camera to see if it works before I go buy an expensive camera setup



This seems to work quite well but I am yet to mate it to a copy stand.


But after this idea I tried to think of easier ways of doing it and more importantly more portable .

Another idea was to make a light box type unit where I used an old microfiche machine to project an image against a opaque sheet and take a photo from the other side . This would work but Im thinking the image would be degraded by the opaque sheet and the set up would be large and take time to setup and adjust. Like this I mocked up below.



What I would like to do is hook up a point and shoot camera type camera to a lens out of a old microfiche machine . I just played around with a lens and holding to against a digital camera lens I managed this.



Not bad for just hand holding I think :-)

I'm just wondering if it is possible to make a setup like this and what I need to be reading up on to make it possible . Once it is setup I can control light and distance easy and it would be portable .

Also what settings I would use on the camera and if there is software to so I could connect the camera to the computer.

I know I'm asking a lot but if someone could shove me in the right direction it would be great :-)

Thanks
Paul

[Hasher]

I should say I am using 24 and 48x magnification lens with my compact camera, I guess I need an extension tube of some type.

[rjlittlefield]

Paul, welcome aboard!

My wife does a lot of genealogy too, and since I do a lot of macro photography, we've spent a fair bit of time researching options in this area.

The bottom line is that her "homegrown" microfilm scans now come entirely from one source: a Canon A710 IS compact digital camera, typically handheld and pointed at the back-projection screen of a microfilm reader. For particularly troublesome films, we move to a reader that projects onto an opaque surface, haul out a piece of flat white paper carried for the purpose, and point the camera at that instead.

Despite the apparent casualness of this setup, it's carefully considered. Positives include:
+ Uses the film transport of the microfilm reader, which is optimized to provide both fast and fine positioning of the film without damaging it.
+ Uses the illumination system of the microfilm reader, which is optimized to pump lots of light without heating the film.
+ Uses the reader's lens, which is designed to give a sharp image while looking through the typically thick glass of the film transport.
+ Easy to zoom in to any desired part of the filmed page. (Sometimes this gets as small as a couple of lines of "fine print" in a city directory.)
+ Extremely portable, good for traveling.
+ Works on paper records also.
+ Accepted by librarians at most facilities where copying by users is permitted at all. (A few facilities permit copying but do not allow cameras.)
Negatives include:
- Reader quality varies from place to place.
- Requires practice in holding the camera straight and steady.
- Often has obvious darkening of the corners. (This varies depending on screen quality.)

I might add that we tried and rejected several other cameras including various DSLR setups, before latching onto the A710. It eventually won the competition because of a combination of image quality, easily obtained batteries, and comfortable handling.

My wife's goals are straightforward: to efficiently make readable copies, wherever the records are stored. Learning to use the small camera has turned out to meet those quite well.

What are your goals, and how do you envision using this device you're considering?

--Rik

Edit: to clarify and expand a couple of points.

[Hasher]

Thanks for the reply rjlittlefield .

Well my goal is to make something portable to scan microfiche . As you see the microfiche machine in the picture above is portable . So I have a light source , film carrier and purpose made lens .

As for taking photos of a projections its seems good but Im at the mercy of the environment , Unless I make a black out curtain and control the light around the machine , which adds to complexity and weight.


Also I would like a crisp image as I can covert the picture to a searchable PDF making future Genealogy study very easy :-)

I have an A620 Canon which I can use for testing , Should I be looking to making a extension tube between lens and camera ?

Thanks

[rjlittlefield]

As you see the microfiche machine in the picture above is portable.

I'm happy to take your word for this. Actually all I can see in the picture is a bright screen with an image on it, standing vertical on some sort of flat surface. It could just as well be the upper section of a standard desk-size model for all I could tell.

So I have a light source , film carrier and purpose made lens.

That's a good set to start with. There are two directions you could reasonably go from that starting point, and you've already identified both of them:
1. Project onto a screen and photograph the screen.
2. Use the microfilm lens as a closeup lens, sitting just in front of the camera.

As you've noted, the second direction is probably more portable. However, you may find that the optics do not play well together, and the only way to tell is to try it. The two problems that you're most likely to encounter are vignetting and inability to focus.

To minimize vignetting, you want to have the added lens mounted as close to the camera as possible. Adding extension will only make the vignetting worse. Vignetting is also likely to be worse with a smaller camera and its correspondingly smaller lens. To avoid vignetting, you might have to move up to a DSLR with its larger sensor and larger diameter lens.

To focus in this mode, the microfilm lens will have to be a little closer to the film than when it's projecting onto a screen. That may or may not be possible, depending on design of the lens and its focusing mount in the reader. Sorry I can't tell you anything more specific. Both issues vary a lot depending on exactly what equipment you have at hand.

In general, I think the tradeoff you have to manage is cost versus image quality, considered in light of your goals. With sufficient tinkering, you may be able to put together a home-brew portable reader that will give better quality than simply pointing a compact camera at the screen of whatever commercial reader is installed at the film repository. But it will take a fair bit of tinkering, and when you're done you'll still face the issues of carrying it around and convincing librarians to let you put their film in your machine. Both approaches will meet a goal of producing human-readable images; neither will produce very many images that can be automatically processed by OCR.

I apologize if this sounds unduly negative, but I'm concerned that the effort you've described is likely to turn into a big time sink without ever producing results to make it worthwhile. YMMV, of course.

Best regards,
--Rik

[ChrisR]

Hi Hasher
I confess I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in dead people. However, my wife, unfathomably to me, does.
I shouldn't complain, her hobbies' accoutrements in the house are mostly on paper or disc, so take up considerably less volume than mine.

She does have a fiche reader, so I consulted her on its use, and the practices of her similarly afflicted fellows, as they inexplicably forage for their useless information in hushed chambers!

I notice that you're asking about fiche readers, and Rik is saying "film". This could be a country-specific difference, Rik is in the USA, we don't know for sure where you are - ?
My wife tells me "fiche" refers to the 6x4 ish inch pieces of film, and "film", the stuff on rolls.
From the look of the power outlet in your picture, you're in the USA?
In the UK it seems there are different machines depending which records office you're in, and where within said office, though since all the transcribed (from handwriting) material has been put onto digital storage now, there's very little demand for them. Perhaps that's not the case where you are? I thought the Mormons had "got" everyone online now - ( in the nicest possible way ! )
In the UK the fiches cost very little now (where they remain available). Some of the more interesting are photographed copies of original parish records, where they exist.

The machine in our dungeon is a Microphax, long obsolete, with a fairly horrible sloping screen inside the hood. There appears to be no provision to remove the hood.
I have photographed a few pages in the past, using a slide-sorting light box and a DSLR/extension tube, resting on a sheet of acetate over the film, which I'm sure yielded a far better result than would have been easily achievable from the screen. If you have your own fiches that’s the way I’d go.

However assuming Rik is correct, in that you would be best photographing the screen in the public situation, then something like this
http://www.alanwood.net/photography/oly ... stand.html would appear to be of use. If the dimensions of the available machines is standard, that would help a lot, as the legs could be put in the corners. And then, a black cloth could be draped over the legs, to keep out extraneous light.
That one was Olympus' version of an idea originally by Leitz - you will see many versions from time to time on ebay. The original Leitz version had quite narrowly splayed legs, and it's about 5 times the price of the copies which are typically $30 - $50. I’ve never seen an Olympus version.

There was an adapter ring available for those Canon cameras ( I have one somewhere) and others of its ilk, which could with a few parts from ebay be made to fit the camera onto the stand. It also makes a handy general purpose document copy stand for parts of books, and indeed a lightbox.
You could chop up your reader to use as a light source, but brightness of the light isn’t really a problem.

[rjlittlefield]

I notice that you're asking about fiche readers, and Rik is saying "film". This could be a country-specific difference

We use the same terminology here in the US: fiche refers to rigid sheets, where film refers to rolls. But which medium is commonly used may be different. My wife reports that she "hardly ever" uses fiche, because mostly those are indexes rather than the original records that she really cares about. The original records are on film. Offhand I think the issues are similar, except that transport is simpler with fiche.

The image on Paul's screen does appear to be fiche, not film. I didn't notice that before.

--Rik

[Hasher]

Hi all

Thanks for the replys . Yes im talking fiche as in the sheet with all the tiny pictures on it , Think correct description is COM Fiche. They are divided into a few catargorys . But mine are 24 and 48x . I already have a solution for the roll film type

No Im Australian and going overseas soon on a research trip into family in Latvia .

Going to try rigging up a lens to an EOS camera and then if that fails go for the light box approach.

Here is some commercial machine pictures of what im trying to achieve









Hope this explains better what im trying to do

Paul

[rjlittlefield]

Just curious, what does your solution for the roll film type look like? Can you modify it to handle fiche also?

As an aside, I'm intrigued to see the letters COM here. In the COM fiche that I'm used to, those first two letters stand for Computer Output. If that's the case for yours also, then you're struggling to re-capture information that was already inside a computer as searchable text at some time and was saved by being written to film instead of maintained on electronic media. Is that the case, or will you be going after records that were originally on paper and have been optically photographed to save space?

--Rik

[Hasher]

Hi rj

I use a machine like this, Just can slide the 35mm film thru.




But not got enough for microfiche

[DQE]

Is there any possibility that a relatively high-resolution desktop scanner could adequately digitize microfilm or microfiche images? There are both optical and pixels-per-mm issues, of course. From Rik's description of his wife's needs, such a device might not be usable in many genealogy records environments, anyway.

Not too many years ago Nikon sold a high-quality transparency digitizer family, but I think they are no longer manufactured. I bought the 5000 ED model, to digitize my accumulated 35mm slide collection (and then I calculated how long it would take me to scan even 10% of the collection!!). It is spec'd at 4000 dpi and could do multi-sample scanning to improve image quality. The 9000 model could handle 6x9 film (I think this is a "cm" metric dimension). These devices, if suitable, may be available through ebay, etc, but I gather that they have become collector's items to some extent.