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General discussion

16 mm Microfilm Conversion

by T442163 Sep 12, 2010 2:27PM PDT

While I am not a business, I think this Forum might be the best to get an answer on; I hope?! If I am wrong, please let me know.

I am looking into a project to convert a now defunct auto manufacturers production records that were converted to 16 mm micro film back in 1959. These records were on tissue thin paper from the mid 1930's to the 1950's, so the 1959 microfilm copies are quite poor, at best.

I am looking for some type of device or product that will not cost me an arm and a leg that can convert this information or at least the images to something that is PC compapable!?

The smallest year of records I am looking at are 19,200; with at least two years going up to over 100,000 records. So far, I have converted some 1,200 hand keyed records that were on an old DOS file program (PFS File) into an Excel file. This was a very slow and almost impossible process in itself as these records were done back in the 1980's as a first attempt to save these records.

I am currently running Windows XP on my Laptop & main desktop PC's but also have two windows 98 machines as well as several old DOS PC's and one still working on Windows 3.1. While I deal with a lot of old files and formats; I still have 5 1/4", 3 1/2", Floppie and ZIP 100 drives, I also have DVD/CD and smart media XD drives as well. None of which I think will help in this project.

Any Suggestions would be most welcome. Thank you for your time.

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Re: converting microfilm

by Kees Bakker Sep 13, 2010 4:14AM PDT

Not something for an amateur, I think. I googled CONVERT MICROFILM and got some interesting hits. Have a look.

The easy part is scanning those pics to bitmap or jpg-format. All you need: a scanning machine and a large hard disk. And - of course - a good backup medium. 1 bitmap = 5 MB. 100.000 bitmaps = 500.000 MB = 500 GB. That's doable.
The difficult part: OCR to make it into DATA in stead of PICTURES.

Kees

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