Newspaper Scanning is still important today, in the digital era. It’s not so much a thing with the current newspapers, it’s more about digitizing and scanning old newspapers from archives. It’s converting each and individual newspaper article into a separate entity, just like you would see with online newspapers today.
These are usually found with large publishers, specific newspapers that have lasted over the years, and mostly with libraries, which tend to collect newspapers on a daily basis. This is where you will find the largest newspaper and magazine archives.
Given that as time passes things are going digital, having a solution to retrieve data and information from the past in a contemporary form is nothing short of a technological wonder. We must really appreciate the effort and time invested by suppliers in matching current needs and demand with old standardized information.
No | Model | Scanning Size | Resolution | Speed | Special Features | Price |
1 |
| 91 cm or 36″ width by unlimited length | up to 600dpi optical resolution | 200 dpi – 18.9 m/min (12.4 inch/s) 300 dpi – 12.6 m/min (8.3 inch/s) 400 dpi – 4.7 m/min (3.1 inch/s) |
| Check the price |
| 2 | Bound Newspaper Scanner
| 635 x 850 mm (25 x 33.5 inches), 8% > DIN A1 | up to 600dpi optical resolution | DIN A1+ @ 200 dpi: 1.5 s DIN A1+ @ 300 dpi: 2.1 s DIN A1+ @ 400 dpi: 2.8 s |
| Check the price |
Scanning Newspaper Articles
The first step of this process revolves around scanning. That is right, turning a physical newspaper into a digital image file. This means scanning it with the right scanner and with the appropriate scanning settings.
In the following paragraphs we will go through most of the aspects you have to take into account before and while you are working on such projects. Things like the scanner you should use, the OCR technology and even advanced conversion software that delivers digital articles from physical newspapers.
Bound newspapers or loose sheet newspapers
When scanning a newspaper, you can expect to find it in one of two ways: bound like a book or in loose sheets. We have seen that major archives tend to have newspapers in bound volumes, given that they have to fit large amounts of documents in their archive.
Loose sheets are more popular with actual newspapers, where the archive is fairly lower in volume. In such cases, it’s no problem to keep newspapers editions separately, as they don’t take that much space anyway.
Size of the newspaper
As you probably know, there are more standard sizes when it comes to newspapers. For a starters, there is the broadsheet size. This can range from 375mm by 597 in the UK, to 380 by 578 in the US, and even 410 by 578mm in South Africa.
Then we have the Berliner, which should be the second largest size, maybe the third largest actually, when taking into account the CINER size. But the Ciner size is not that popular in general, so take into account the Berliner and then the Tabloid size.
So depending on the size of the document, you should choose the scanner appropriately. Don’t forget, the sizes vary when the newspaper is closed or open, so this should also be considered when thinking what to use.
Resolution of the scanned newspaper
We always emphasize to scan at a very good resolution. Besides the actual time the document spends passing through the scanner, there will be some other tasks you will do for the actual scanning process. So take into account how long they take, and consider that you can downsize the resolution digitally, but you can’t increase it after scanning the papers.
Therefore always scan at the maximum resolution you will need, and go down from there digitally, based on what you require the files for. So let’s think it through a little bit. You should have a 300dpi scanned newspaper for archiving. I would think that 400dpi could be a better solution a lot of the times, especially if you are planning to use the documents for content capture or extract data from the images.