Need help identifying unedited/low-quality scans

[kitsunebi]

I'd like all members of the site to help me out here.  As many of you know, Retromags likes to hold itself to a certain standard of quality regarding the scans available to download on our site.  This wasn't always the case, however, and many years ago, poor quality scans and unedited scans alike were allowed here.  Many such scans have been marked in our database as needing a rescan, but others have not.

Since I don't download the majority of mags available here, it's not something that's easy for me to check, so here's my request - if you download a mag from our site that has not been properly edited (the pages are skewed or improperly cropped), or else are just generally in low-quality condition (either the condition of the scan or the mag itself), could you post the issue name and number here so we can more comprehensively mark those issues in need of a re-scan?

Muchas gracias.

[JhonnyD]

I assume that would be concern mostly US and UK scans, looked at the argentina magazines and they seems uploaded all by emol and are looking good

[JhonnyD]

another thing, I took a look at two issues of famitsu scanned by you (43 and 169), I think a new tag like "need pages/improvement" would be more suitable since they're missing a few parts or have the stickers used on the map

 

[JhonnyD]

Another thing is how supplement inside the magazine are handled, I think the best option would bento have the, inside the magazine and replicate them also in the supplement sub categories like in EGM 31 for example

[kitsunebi]

1 hour ago, JhonnyD said:

another thing, I took a look at two issues of famitsu scanned by you (43 and 169), I think a new tag like "need pages/improvement" would be more suitable since they're missing a few parts or have the stickers used on the map

 

Thanks for the feedback.  We have a way of identifying incomplete scans with missing pages, but since those mags you mentioned are complete, there's no need.  You perhaps misread the description detailing the extra effort I went to to obtain the missing pages in order to make sure the mags are complete.  As for a couple of stickers peeled off of a supplemental bonus page that isn't even part of the magazine, we're not going to be so picky as to mark magazines as "in need of improvement" for something so trivial.  If you have or want to purchase a copy of the magazine and upload a scan of that page, I'd be happy to add it to the archive.

Again, this thread is to identify unedited scans, most of which will be marked as uploaded by Phillyman, but no scanner or editor will be identified.  This is because they are old scans from a time before we had any quality standards, and data on who scanned and edited then was lost in a data crash.

Missing pages and other problems should be reported in the relevant threads (do a search if you can't find it).

[JhonnyD]

Sorry to be nitpicking but this site is so great that I want it to become the MAME equivalent of printed media preservation: no compromise fidelity 

However we can start worrying about missing stickers once all the other famitsu issues are uploaded

 

So I should check only magazines marked as uploaded? Can I assume that everything marked as preserved is good?

[kitsunebi]

No need to go out of your way checking everything.  But if you happen to download something and notice that it's unedited, let us know.

All mags available to be downloaded here should be marked as "Preserved."  Unedited mags or mags with some other significant problems that we would like to eventually replace with a completely new scan should be marked as "Preserved (R)."  I recently downloaded a couple of unedited mags which were not flagged as "(R)", so I'm sure there are others.  That is what this thread is for - it will allow us to flip those issues' tags from "Preserved" to "Preserved (R)".  That's all.

[Phillyman]

I can clarify that field a bit more if we think it will help....something like this?

[kitsunebi]

I think "rescan needed" is better than "redo". 

I suppose "redo" is supposed to be a catch-all for scanning or editing, but anything in need of editing would probably need a new scan as well.  Most if not all of the mags in question were submitted years ago by who-knows-who, so even IF they still had the original scan files, we'd have no way of contacting them. 

[Phillyman]

4 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I think "rescan needed" is better than "redo". 

I suppose "redo" is supposed to be a catch-all for scanning or editing, but anything in need of editing would probably need a new scan as well.  Most if not all of the mags in question were submitted years ago by who-knows-who, so even IF they still had the original scan files, we'd have no way of contacting them. 

Ok, I changed it. This was one of the reasons I set up a QNAP that we could use as a centralized storage for Retromags. If someone scans a magazine, hopefully they would dump the raw scanned images to the QNAP and then the finalized .CBR/.CBZ, so we could go back and rework edits for any pages that needed touching up.

[kitsunebi]

Oh wow.  So we have room to indefinitely store RAW data for all of our uploads? 

Or even better, we could upload 600dpi versions of the edited files (those of us who scan at 600dpi, anyway).  For a time in the future when no one minds downloading a 2 GB magazine.

[Phillyman]

7 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Oh wow.  So we have room to indefinitely store RAW data for all of our uploads? 

Or even better, we could upload 600dpi versions of the edited files (those of us who scan at 600dpi, anyway).  For a time in the future when no one minds downloading a 2 GB magazine.

Correct, right now we have four 6TB drives in a RAID10 config that gives us about 11TB worth of space, I think we are using 1TB at the moment. But I can replace out the 6TB drives with 14TB drives which would bring us up to 26TB, or just move to a 5 or 8 bay enclosure and add more drives.

[MigJmz]

Now if we can only get editors to fill up those hard drive space  with magazines 

[kitsunebi]

20 hours ago, Phillyman said:

Correct, right now we have four 6TB drives in a RAID10 config that gives us about 11TB worth of space, I think we are using 1TB at the moment. But I can replace out the 6TB drives with 14TB drives which would bring us up to 26TB, or just move to a 5 or 8 bay enclosure and add more drives.

As the owner of...let's just say, a lot more storage than 11 or even 26 TB of storage, I keep waiting for larger drives to hit the market at an affordable price, but for the longest time now, 8TB drives have been the best price/performance value on the market.  Which is why I have 5 of them, I guess (plus a bunch of older, smaller ones.)   Where the hell are the 100 TB drives? Or better yet, what comes after terabyte again?

[Phillyman]

7 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

As the owner of...let's just say, a lot more storage than 11 or even 26 TB of storage, I keep waiting for larger drives to hit the market at an affordable price, but for the longest time now, 8TB drives have been the best price/performance value on the market.  Which is why I have 5 of them, I guess (plus a bunch of older, smaller ones.)   Where the hell are the 100 TB drives? Or better yet, what comes after terabyte again?

Over in the states we can now pick up 8TB drives for around $130 and 10TB for around $160

Getting there, slowly

 

[kitsunebi]

3 hours ago, Phillyman said:

Over in the states we can now pick up 8TB drives for around $130 and 10TB for around $160

Getting there, slowly

 

Tell me where you're shopping and I'll see if it's possible for me to order from there.  I usually buy from Amazon, but they don't have 10TB drives anywhere near that cheap.

[Phillyman]

Bestbuy.com has been where I picked up my ten or so 8TB drives in the last few months, they were costing me from $130 to $159 depending when I was buying them. Now the 10TB versions are going on sale every few weeks or so. These are external drives, but they have Western Digital Red (NAS) drives inside of them, takes about 5 minutes to shuck the drives out of the enclosure so you can throw them in a PC or NAS.

 

8TB

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401

 

10TB

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-10tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-with-32gb-easystore-usb-flash-drive-black/6290669.p?skuId=6290669

 

They dip in price from time to time, if your on Reddit keep an eye on this section

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder

 

Edit: Adding Shucking Video

 

[kitsunebi]

Yeah, the WD 10TB external drive hasn't been released in Japan yet, but the internal version of the drive you mentioned above still sells for around $400 here.  The only external 10TB drives available on Amazon.jp are between $700-800.

In case you're wondering, I usually buy ALL of my computer-related stuff from America.  Even with international shipping, it ends up being cheaper.  Japan is just too far behind the technology curve on anything that isn't a toilet seat.

[MigJmz]

re-doing Official Sega Saturn Magazine covers. They are low thumbnail quality!

[MigJmz]

Speaking of Official Sega Saturn Magazine why are there scans of these mags on archive.org with the retromags credits page on them but they are not hosted here?

[kitsunebi]

54 minutes ago, MigJmz said:

Speaking of Official Sega Saturn Magazine why are there scans of these mags on archive.org with the retromags credits page on them but they are not hosted here?

I'm not going to download a copy to find out, since OOPA has much higher quality scans of all of those issues, but the filesize is a good indicator of why they aren't hosted here anymore.  Those are 100 page mags, but the files at archive.org are less than 70 MB each.  That tells me that the jpgs are either very compressed or else smaller than the Retromags minimum size of 2200 px high.  So they were removed.

It's possible that the two factors are related - i.e. Meppi may have been the scanner/editor of the files you see at archive, and when he left RM to start OOPA, he requested those files be removed, then later rescanned them at a higher quality for his own site.  But that's just wild speculation on my part, since all of that went down before I was a member here.

[Phillyman]

5 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

 Meppi may have been the scanner/editor of the files you see at archive, and when he left RM to start OOPA, he requested those files be removed, then later rescanned them at a higher quality for his own site.  But that's just wild speculation on my part, since all of that went down before I was a member here. 

BINGO!