Any scanners in the UK?

[Trickster]

There are some very particular UK magazine scans that I really want to get my hands on. I can actually find quite a few of them for sale in the UK, but getting them shipped to Australia would cost a fortune. Is there anyone on this site that lives in the UK and would like to take shipment of some Amiga and Multi-Format magazines for scanning?

My main priorities are to get scans of the following:

• 43 missing Computer & Video Games magazines
• 35 missing Amiga User International magazines
• 24 missing Amiga Action magazines

I've noticed today that retrogamingworld have 16 of the missing Amiga User International mags. I'd pay for them if there's someone willing. I can also see a few of the Amiga Actions at Sell My Retro.

Cheers,

Tricky. 

[kitsunebi]

We haven't had any UK scanners since one of our members packed his bags and left to open his own site (OutOfPrintArchive), which was before my time.  We need some new blood!

I'm not in the UK or you could ship all of the 112 mags you're looking for to me and I could scan them over...oh...the next 8 years or so.

[Trickster]

23 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

We haven't had any UK scanners since one of our members packed his bags and left to open his own site (OutOfPrintArchive), which was before my time.  We need some new blood!

I'm not in the UK or you could ship all of the 112 mags you're looking for to me and I could scan them over...oh...the next 8 years or so.

Thanks for the info. I've checked out OutOfPrintArchive, but they seem so meticulous that they wouldn't get to any magazines I send them for years. Also seem very focused on Nintendo and Sega.

If anyone from the UK stumbles across this topic and wants to scan some magazines, please get in touch with me. 

[kitsunebi]

1 minute ago, Trickster said:

Thanks for the info. I've checked out OutOfPrintArchive, but they seem so meticulous that they wouldn't get to any magazines I send them for years. Also seem very focused on Nintendo and Sega.

If anyone from the UK stumbles across this topic and wants to scan some magazines, please get in touch with me. 

Yeah, their scans are pretty, but for all the time they spend on them, I think they believe they're doing something important like restoring the Mona Lisa and not just scanning children's video game magazines.

Another problem with the lack of UK scanners may be due to the unfortunate sizing of many UK mags.  A lot (most) of them are too wide to fit in an A4 scanner.  And the difference between a nice A4 scanner and a nice A3 scanner is the difference between $400 and $2000.  I could never justify the expense of purchasing a scanner large enough to scan UK mags.

[gingerbeardman]

I'm in the UK and am happy to scan.

I also have an IPEVO Ziggi HD document camera that I use for certain things (mainly books I don't want to unbind) as it's got a timer mode that takes shots every 3 seconds as you turn pages which is often far easier than my flatbed.

[kitsunebi]

7 minutes ago, gingerbeardman said:

I'm in the UK and am happy to scan.

I also have an IPEVO Ziggi HD document camera that I use for certain things (mainly books I don't want to unbind) as it's got a timer mode that takes shots every 3 seconds as you turn pages which is often far easier than my flatbed.

While Trickster might be OK with having copies for his own use made with a document camera, keep in mind that they wouldn't be considered high quality enough to be allowed on our site.  Which isn't to say you couldn't upload them somewhere else.

[gingerbeardman]

Sure thing, let me know where I can read about quality guidelines.

[kitsunebi]

9 minutes ago, gingerbeardman said:

Sure thing, let me know where I can read about quality guidelines.

There are some guides under "support" at the top of the page.  Which is not to say that you have to follow those guides exactly (I don't).  They are written by one person using that person's equipment and software, so if your particulars differ, your methods will as well.  They're really just there for people who have never debound/scanned/edited a magazine before to use as a starting point.

One of these days, I'm gonna have to make my own guides so I can point to them and say "but these are the guides you really ought to look at..."

[gingerbeardman]

These are some scans I previously did: https://archive.org/details/Electric-Brain

[kitsunebi]

Yeah, archive.org is the perfect place for photographic archives of still-bound mags.  I'm not knocking your scans, btw.  A lot of mags saved on my hard drive are photo-docs that came from archive.org or elsewhere.  As long as it's readable, it's a valuable contribution.  But a decision was made years ago at Retromags to try to maintain certain standards with the scans we create and host on our servers - in fact many of the older scans made by Retromags members didn't meet those standards and were removed or flagged as in need of a rescan.  While photo-docs can be done quite well and are just as readable as a scan, the distortion on the gutter side of a bound mag (whether photoed or scanned) is one thing that would almost certainly disqualify it from being allowed here.  But again, there's nothing wrong with uploading such things to archive.org or anywhere else that would have them.  And we'd of course love to hear about any new scans here no matter what was used to make them.

[gingerbeardman]

Sure, the scans above where done on my HP flatbed scanner.

I generally only do camera work when I'm doing pure OCR (ebooks)

[kitsunebi]

Well, as I said, whether on a flatbed or not, it's unlikely that we could accept a scan of a mag that hasn't been de-bound.  The only possible exception would be if the mag was exceptionally thin and could be laid flat enough to not be noticeable.  A normal size mag simply can't be laid flat enough to get a scan that isn't distorted at on the gutter side.  The one you linked to is only 40 pages, but even if it had been edited per our guidelines, the gutter distortion would still be noticeable.  I'm pretty sure that Kiwi's World would tell you the same thing, and the super-perfectionists at OutOfPrintArchive would probably die of a heart attack at the mere suggestion of having gutter curl visible.

I only brought all this up as an aside, though, really.  I assume that any deal you come to regarding scanning would be between Trickster and yourself, so our scanning standards are neither here nor there. 

[gingerbeardman]

Hahahah! Understood.

I'm intending to get a used feed- through scanner soon. 

[kitsunebi]

We would definitely love having someone helping to fill out our UK mag section.  Though as I pointed out above, a lot of the mags produced in the UK are too big to be scanned by a normal scanner.  Why'd you guys have to make things so difficult???

[gingerbeardman]

Because we're British. That's the answer to so many questions.

[Trickster]

7 hours ago, gingerbeardman said:

Because we're British. That's the answer to so many questions.

Hi Gingerbeardman (great name by the way)! Thank you very much for offering to help.

I of course would prefer for any scans to be up to the standard of retromags to give something back to this community, but selfishly would accept any clean and legible scans.

If you're up for it, there are a bunch of Amiga User International magazines at the Retro Gaming World shop in Stafford. I would buy 10 of them to start with and get them sent to your address. Please message me your address if this all still sounds good to you.

Cheers! 

[kitsunebi]

1 minute ago, Trickster said:

I of course would prefer for any scans to be up to the standard of retromags to give something back to this community, but selfishly would accept any clean and legible scans.

If you're up for it, there are a bunch of Amiga User International magazines at the Retro Gaming World shop in Stafford. I would buy 10 of them to start with and get them sent to your address. Please message me your address if this all still sounds good to you.

Cheers! 

Well, the good news is that if YOU'RE the one paying for the mags, it might not bother him as much to debind them in order to get a clean scan.  That's partly why I started out scanning Japanese mags.  Sure, they were cheap to obtain and the only thing immediately at hand anyway, but I also didn't have any personal attachment to them, having purchased them strictly for the purpose of scanning.  Meanwhile, my precious PC Gamers remain in storage back in America, since I'm not sure I'd have the stomach to cut them to pieces in order to scan them.

[gingerbeardman]

I bought a FUJITSU ScanSnap S1300i on Shpock today for £20+delivery (I organised collect+ for £10) which I think is a pretty good price. So really I have a few options now.

@Trickster do you know, or can you find out, the dimensions of an issue of Amiga User International? Then I can figure out logistics and make a proposal/commit to the scanning!

[Trickster]

3 hours ago, gingerbeardman said:

I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i on Shpock today for £20+delivery (I organised collect+ for £10) which I think is a pretty good price. So really I have a few options now.

@Trickster do you know, or can you find out, the dimensions of an issue of Amiga User International? Then I can figure out logistics and make a proposal/commit to the scanning!

I'm afraid I have no idea. I owned a lot of Amiga magazines in my youth, but sadly (aaarrrgghhhh!!!!) threw them all out when I got married. I didn't even realise that UK magazines had different dimensions until Kitsunebi informed me.

[KiwiArcader]

If you take a look at the download page on my website for this particular title you will see that early issues up to early 1991 are A4 format and will scan nicely in Snapscan. However, later issues in 1991 and onward adopted a wider format by approx 18mm and would look horrid unless scanned on an A3 scanner as essentially you would need to crop the page significantly to fit them though the scanner. Height is fine, width is not.

I've overlaid an A4 issue over a later cover to show the difference. Hope that helps ..... 

[Trickster]

1 minute ago, KiwiArcader said:

If you take a look at the download page on my website for this particular title you will see that early issues up to early 1991 are A4 format and will scan nicely in Snapscan. However, later issues in 1991 and onward adopted a wider format by approx 18mm and would look horrid unless scanned on an A3 scanner as essentially you would need to crop the page significantly to fit them though the scanner. Height is fine, width is not.

I've overlaid an A4 issue over a later cover to show the difference. Hope that helps ..... 

Thanks Kiwi! That's super helpful.

To be clear Gingerbeardman, 1 out of the 10 magazines is in the older A4 format, whereas the other 9 will need an A3 scanner to capture properly.

[kitsunebi]

From what I can tell, the scanner Gingerbeardman bought is incapable of scanning anything wider than A4 size, so he would be unable to scan all but that one issue.

This is why British mags are so frustrating.  A nice A4 document scanner is fairly expensive, but an A3 document scanner is just ridiculous.  5 times the cost or more, easily. 

Oh hey, here's a nice one.  Only $16,000 I mean, sure, you COULD buy a new car, but wouldn't you rather be able to scan issues of Amiga User?

https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-Fi-6800-Document-Scanner-Category/dp/B00VXVZVTA/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1518510308&sr=8-13&keywords=a3+document+scanner

[KiwiArcader]

I obtained my fi-5650c off eBay for $200 + postage. It's always a risk but if you do get a good one you end up with A3 scanning for cheap.

[kitsunebi]

I would just assume that if you live in the UK, you should either get an A3 scanner (by whatever means are affordable), or not bother.  There are too many mags that couldn't be scanned otherwise.

I'm assuming Australia must have imported a lot of UK mags by looking at the stuff Kiwi usually scans?  So he needs one as well.

For those in the US, it isn't really necessary.  Almost nothing is printed larger than A4 (although at least a couple are, IIRC).  Japan as well.  I've never bought a mag here that wasn't A4, although some are smaller (B5) and I believe recent issues of Dengeki G's Magazine are printed in the larger UK size, but those aren't allowed to be scanned yet, anyway.

[gingerbeardman]

Let's see how I get on with my Electric Brain rescan.