A primary goal of CXP has been to evaluate the paper output printed on
the Xerox DocuTech, a high-speed printer that produces 600-dpi pages from
scanned images at a rate of 135 pages a minute. KENNEY recounted several
publishing challenges to represent faithful and legible reproductions of
the originals that the 600-dpi copy for the most part successfully
captured. For example, many of the deteriorating volumes in the project
were heavily illustrated with fine line drawings or halftones or came in
languages such as Japanese, in which the buildup of characters comprised
of varying strokes is difficult to reproduce at lower resolutions; a
surprising number of them came with annotations and mathematical
formulas, which it was critical to be able to duplicate exactly.
KENNEY noted that 1) the copies are being printed on paper that meets the
ANSI standards for performance, 2) the DocuTech printer meets the machine
and toner requirements for proper adhesion of print to page, as described
by the National Archives, and thus 3) paper product is considered to be
the archival equivalent of preservation photocopy.
KENNEY then discussed several samples of the quality achieved in the
project that had been distributed in a handout, for example, a copy of a
print-on-demand version of the 1911 Reed lecture on the steam turbine,
which contains halftones, line drawings, and illustrations embedded in
text; the first four loose pages in the volume compared the capture
capabilities of scanning to photocopy for a standard test target, the
IEEE standard 167A 1987 test chart. In all instances scanning proved
superior to photocopy, though only slightly more so in one.
Conceding the simplistic nature of her review of the quality of scanning
to photocopy, KENNEY described it as one representation of the kinds of
settings that could be used with scanning capabilities on the equipment
CXP uses. KENNEY also pointed out that CXP investigated the quality
achieved with binary scanning only, and noted the great promise in gray
scale and color scanning, whose advantages and disadvantages need to be
examined. She argued further that scanning resolutions and file formats
can represent a complex trade-off between the time it takes to capture
material, file size, fidelity to the original, and on-screen display; and
printing and equipment availability. All these factors must be taken
into consideration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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