KiwiArcader

I think you are referring to mags like: Replay Magazine Play Meter Cashbox International - Australian independent trade magazine Leisure Line - Australian trade magazine produces by Australia's largest arcade supplier

Wow!! That's $33NZ. Maybe the 6000gr box has a reduced price?

Well, if you happened to be throwing out 10 square bound Dengeki Deamcast mags into the trash at some point I'd probably be tempted to get them shipped

That's about $150NZ. Assuming 10 mags because Japanese ones are always 400+ pages ... LOL ...that's $15 each plus whatever the seller wants for them. So the guy selling one mag for $150 with free shipping is making $130 in profit for a mag he may have paid $1 for. Yikes!!

What I'd like to know exactly how much it would cost to ship a box of mags from Japan to New Zealand? It can't be that expensive surely? Well ... maybe it can but you don't know if you can't get a price as an indicator.

Have you checked eBay lately? Friggin' heck. You have Japanese sellers touting Dengeki or Famitsu mags for $150 for ONE mag. If that doesn't show a rip-off merchant I don't know what does?

I don't think it's crazy. I'd happily scan Japanese mags for my website but the simple fact is that there are no mags for sale on the local auction site in New Zealand. I have almost every issue of Dreamcast Official (Japan) to scan and will be doing so soon. My guillotine to cut them is buggered and at $400 to replace it I don't have the funds to so therefore have to look at scanning the whole pages after destapling them. That requires decent splitting software which I am looking into. But again, these weren't procured locally. A Retromags member asked if anyone would scan them here and no-one volunteered so he shipped them at a HIDEOUS cost from the States to New Zealand for me to scan them. That's because Japanese mags are friggin' huge and no-one in Japan seems keen to accommodate shipping offshore. It's all a very weird situation as according to kitsunebi there is an underground scanning scene there but where people trade scans and nothing gets a public release.

Flatbed scanners are great when you just cannot seem to get a page scanned through the ADF without slipping causing bad scans OR because the cover is cardboard and simply cannot be used on an ADF system (I scan books as well as mags which is where that comment comes from). I think you misunderstand although I can only comment regarding my website and not Retromags. kitsunebi has spelt out the standards here at Retromags and they are not that onerous. Try looking at OoPA if you want to see quality nitpicking of the Jedi magnitude. Meanwhile, for OGM I take a similar but slightly more relaxed view in that as long as: They aren't raw scans, e.g, they have been cropped Scanned more than 200DPI preferably preferably received NOT resized but that is desirable and not mandatory .... then I am okay with that. Blemishes on the pages I am okay with as I'd rather get the magazines out there for someone else to contribute by editing. There are too few scanning members in our "scene" so I adopt that mantra because if a scanning member quits or becomes incapacitated and they never got around to scanning their collection because they were too busy doing nitpicky editing work then that's a tragedy for the preservation scene, especially if they are the only one with previously unscanned mags. The big problem with book scanners is that by having the lens so far away from the printed page it layers in the typical blurring you get as a result of that. With images that isn't really a problem which is why camera's are good for that type of thing. Text of the size on a typical magazine on the other hand really doesn't lend well to being photographed. Too many factors come into play. Archive.org is probably THE WORST place for quality scans. They use book scanners in a major way as they use them to photograph Library of Congress and other material etc which obviously cannot be destroyed to get a digital copy. You can see it in their scans which can be described as mediocre at best. The best scans they have over there were ripped off sites like our wholesale by their resident wanker Jason "Sketch the Cow" Scott without any acknowledgement of where he got them at all. They are pretty much a swear word around here.

That may be okay for your own personal scans or putting them up on archive.org but book scanners are not suitable for archival purposes as kitsunebi has stated previously. If you do NOT want to debind your magazine your only realistic option for good scans is a flatbed scanner. If you go down that path I would suggest an A3 scanner like the Brother MFC-J6530DW as although you only need A4 it gives you the ability to try and flatten the magazine as much as possible to reduce blurring in the gutter.

I know. You are my Can idol. I only hope you never decide to Can idle ...... although if you did maybe Black Squirrel would step in and take up the "Can"tle

If I had a super set of Can pics on there I'd likely charge more that's for sure.

I dunno. Jason the Cow is pretty good. Probably even better than Black Squirrel. He might be able to get past our team member defenses with the might of the archive.org machine!!

The ONLY problem with that will be when I search for Cans. I'll get a bazillion images of the same pair of Cans. Hopefully they will a nice set or else ...

@Black Squirrel ....where are you? ..... I'm pretty sure this is right up your alley. You can do it .... we know you can. Your reputation as a backer upper is second to none. Hey ... here's a thought. He could backup Retromags to RetroCDN (he likely already has I believe) then backup RetroCDN to Retromags for one big incestuous pool of Retro then if he added Playboy we could call the site RetroCans ... Retro for gaming mags and Cans for well, boobies. Man oh man!!! .... I'm salivating at the prospect!!

I am casually surprised BlackSquirrel hasn't tried to backup Archive.org onto RetroCDN. He's pretty much filched every file he can grab off Retromags so maybe the poor quality is what is saving Archive's collections from wholesale leeching?

That's why I only do a modicum of cleanup on my releases. I work on the basis of my scans being better than 90% out there and better to get content out there than sit on it editing the crap out of it and only releasing one mag per calendar year.

Just don't necessarily expect content at archive.org to have a good level of quality of scans over there as they don't even have a baseline on what is considered a minimum acceptable level. Retromags they are not!!!

That's a bit of a rarity for you E-Day

No ... he has 300 odd mags covered

I have a couple of thousand mags in my basement. A lot of these were acquired at the time of release and the only reason I still have them is because I have a basement so didn't get my ass chewed off by the wife to get rid of them. No collectors mentality here. I just paid money for them and couldn't bring myself to throw them given what they cost me. I will say though that I purposely dumped pretty much all my collection of PC Gamer (USA) from issue 01 thru 90'ish and burned a few others after Meppi/triverse pissed me off over the year 2000 saga here at Retromags back then. Regretted that after I started scanning mags for my own site though I must admit. After getting into scanning I rapidly realised that the hoarding thing really is a selfish pursuit. I understand it but to me It's like a scientist inventing a cure for Covid-19 then taking a dose himself and putting the rest in his vault. The whole world dies around him and worst case scenario he's the only one left alive to brag about how he invented the cure. Literature was written to be read, understood and appreciated, not hoarded in someones basement.

Well, the mag covers both Australia and New Zealand so that's approx. 30 million people between the two countries that it caters to. I haven't really looked too much at the UK variant so couldn't tell you what percentage of content is a straight copy from versus localised content to be honest. Scanning members are selfless in ensuring such content isn't lost forever. Those people might "get" rich selling their mags off for a profit or are rich for having access to their collections but I like to think we are richer for enabling others to access content they might otherwise never have seen.

A lot of PlayStation Official issues from Australia/New Zealand have also been scanned and released over at OGM. These were essentially localised releases of the UK version.

If you are prepared to risk a second hand unit I'd suggest grabbing a Fujitsu fi-5650c off eBay like this ...... If you get one working unit with no scratches on the glass (from some idiot pushing a document through with a staple still attached) then they will do everything up to A3 no problems at all. I got one off eBay and it has been brilliant. There is likely plenty of places you can get it serviced Stateside and if you do get dust inside the device it is fairly easy to open them up to clean the glass with the top optics being particularly easy. Add to that ISIS drivers and Quickscan software and it's a veritable scanning monster at around sixty pages per minute in duplex. They also scan those fluro/neon colors far better than other units although all the Fujitsu's tend to be good in that regard. The only problem I have had is the greasy tissue thin paper stocks used on American magazines which can cause slipping with older pickup rollers, resulting in a few bad scans. I HATE American mags with a vengeance because of their crappy paper which is why I tend to have predominantly UK magazine scans over at OGM. Much better for my sanity sticking with magazines made of newsprint or better paper stock. In all fairness I think that particular problem affects most ADF style scanners anyway. If you do decide to get one of these make sure you ask the seller what number is displayed on the function display on startup. Devices in working condition cycle from "P" to "1" on boot up. If it sits on "P" or any other letter or number then there is a hardware problem or they had paper in the ADF feed when they turned the unit on. If they say it is in working condition and it isn't you can always send it back anyway.

Yeah, they released a Blu-ray and completely wrecked it with over-saturated color/noise removal and THEN made a 4:3 picture widescreen so the scene at 1:08:33 had her wobbly bits chopped by the re-framing. If a movie was made 4:3 keep it 4:3. Dopes!!!