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Published: Wednesday, 04 March 2015 15:05

Even now when technology is at its most complex and yet most simple and most accessible, individuals and organisation still choose to use microfilming as a way of storing their data. But why is this?

Microfilming is to put documents and other images on to a microfilm, much as you would have when taking pictures on an analogue camera years ago before the advent of digital cameras. But when digital cameras became the norm, analogue cameras for the most part became something of an extinct species which is the same mostly with microfilms and microfiche, but every once in a while this is still a choice when it comes to storing documents in a smaller space.

This is mainly because, though the legal admissibility of scanned documents is better than it once was, people still prefer to have hard copies of their documents and microfiche, microfilm and negatives in general are still the smallest way to store hard-copy versions of documents without taking all the room of files and paper themselves. This is of course mainly down to personal preference and is more often than not a mind-set because digital documents are now just as acceptable as physical ones but not a lot people know this.

Microfilming is still a process that is done with relative ease but it has also become something of a niche service and therefore costings tend to be quite high, especially as it is ultimately a more complex process than actually converting documents to digital files such as PDFs. Converting digitally also makes them more flexible than they are on a microfilm and if microfilms are are viewed, a microfilm reader is also more often than not required and this can become quite expensive.

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Published: Wednesday, 04 March 2015 15:03

More often than not we are approached by people who have microfiche but have almost no idea what to do with them.

Microfiche scanning is not always the first thought when it comes to being able to get access to the fiche in a modern and plausible way. Those that have some idea of what to do with these icons of time gone by search for microfiche readers which as an earlier post discussed are expensive and quite limited solutions.

But the main question now is whether or not microfiche scanning is the best solution to be able to access your files that are on fiche.

You might say we are somewhat biased as a company that features microfiche conversion as one of its main services, but the fact is that if there were a better way and one that was overall a better way to access the fiche we would offer that as a service. The simple fact is that there are realistically only the two options we've already talked about; buying a microfiche viewer or having the microfiche converted by a professional company.

As we talked about in a previous post, microfiche readers are remarkably limited even today. They will literally only offer you the opportunity to view the microfiche and some of the more expensive ones will potentially allow you to print the images too, but that's the extent of them at the best of times and they come at a high price being such a niche item these days.

Microfiche scanning offers you the opportunity to totally modernise your microfiche images. We're not just talking about printing them; that is one of the options, but because you get digital copies of the images you can do virtually anything you want with them and certainly anything you could do with any other digital file. You can modify them, add notes, email, print and share with others as well as post them online if you wish.

Microfiche scanning is also a remarkably cheap way to be able to gain this type of flexibility.

If you're interested in getting your microfiche converted digitally get in contact with us.