I have a bunch of paper wiring diagrams for an old car I own. The size is 17 inches X 31 inches. I would like them scanned using a high-resolution scanner. Are there companies that do this?
I have a regular scanner, and thought about doing it piece-wise (and then stitching them back together). But that would be pretty time consuming.
Try a store like FedEx Office, UPS Store or the print/copy department at Staples. They may have scanners capable of scanning that document.
FWIW, I have a good friend who runs an advertising tech company, and they do all kinds of scanning and printing, for other companies as well as for private customers, They would have a scanner big enough for your documents and happily scan them for you, But I’m in Germany and I don’t know if similar companies exist in your vicinity.
According to this web page (scroll down a bit to scanning services) at least some Staples stores have large format scanners.
https://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/noheader/copy-and-print/blueprints/index.html
Likewise, some FedEx stores offer the same service.
What car are we talking about? Many older wiring diagrams are already scanned and available online. Autozone has free access to many cars. A quick Google search shows other sites that may or may not be free.
I used to be a scanning and color reproduction expert, and even back then I wouldn’t have scanned a doc like this, I would have shot it. Probably with a medium or large format digital camera back with appropriate lighting on either side.
I’ll admit to not being super up-to-date on what’s going on in the repro world these days, but scanner development has atrophied over the last decade and I would assume shooting this would be even more common than back in my day.
if I were in an area where I didn’t have any contacts in the graphic arts world, I would just call a local high quality print shop and ask them where they would get this done.
Staples can do large format documents but the last time I checked they will not scan anything that has a copyright on it. I wanted to have some entertainment posters scanned and printed but even though they were 60 years old and the copyright had probably long since expired, they wouldn’t do them. Best to check with your local store for their policy. If there’s no copyright on them anywhere, you may be in luck.
36-inch scanners aren’t that uncommon, are they? 400 dots per inch is enough for you?
Have you looked into document scanning apps for your phone? I have one that I used daily that I am very happy with.
It detects the edges of the document, straightens it, then saves it into my photos folder. From there, I email the image to myself, then save it in a file on my computer. It is a trivially easy process, and the app is free.
The largest docs I scan are 12x14, so I can’t speak to the quality of the finished product for your purposes.
mmm
Are there apps that can take pics of portions of a big document, one part at a time, and then stitch them back together?
Take pictures of them. I don’t know just how many you have, but that should work fine. I do it all the time, and then email them to myself and do whatever with them.
Works great.
Thanks. I’ll check around w/ some Staples stores tomorrow.
Also, I had difficulty Googling the topic because I didn’t know what key words to use. Now I know these documents are called “large format.”
I think for something like that, I might look for a “reprographic” company. They specialize in reproducing and scanning stuff like engineering drawings and the like, so they’re going to likely be a hair more capable and professional than a big nationwide office supply store when it comes to something like that. That’s what the city I work for uses when they’ve got to scan or print off a bunch of drawings, and it’s what the engineering company I worked for in college used as well. (not for scanning; it wasn’t all digital yet then)
It probably won’t be cheap, but I’ll bet they’ve got large format flatbed scanners they can use that’ll work great.
Depends on how many and how good the quality needs to be.
My go-to solution for scanning is to use an app called Scanner Pro by Readdle on my phone.
The resolution of phone cameras has grown by leaps and bounds, and an app like Scanner Pro allows you to photograph a large document, finesse the corners, and optionally convert it to a high contrast photocopy image.
The app turns your doc into a pdf. Try it out and see if you are satisfied with the results; if not, go for the big guns and take it to a pro.
I have several hundred pages of sheet music on my various devices that I scanned in this way.
The size here (31 x 17 inches) would need about 12 megapixels to get 100 dpi. Less than that is going to start getting fuzzy.
a 24Mp picture is 6000x4000 (or some variation). 6000/31 is 193 pixels/inch, which should be more than adequate for most uses. If you want more, then 2 pictures stitched will be easier than a dozen regular page size scans to stitch. The trick is to line up the camera so each pic is flat, same size, same distance from camera, etc. I would set up the camera precisely on a tripod pointed at a wall or whatever, then move the picture to hand in the right place…. ie. use magnets on your fridge to hang it?
I used to work in a place where the engineering department had a blueprint xerox (actually, B&W) that would do 36” wide reproductions. They would modify old drawings by pasting a blank piece over a really old drawing and then filling that area in with new details. (All-new drawings were saved as Autocad files.)It was too early at the time for saving theses as jpg files (or PDF) but I would imagine the modern equivalent devices do just that - which is what the picture in the Fedex link looks like… and nowadays, in colour… By now I’m sure the whole blueprint vault has been digitized.
I still have a 3’x6’ map/blueprint of Pompeii that I made by gluing together xerox copies of page segments from a book, then running that through the engineering xerox.
Why would this be better than just taking a single picture of the entire thing? Adobe has a document app for the phone. That’s what I’d use to “scan” this thing.
Better resolution, especially for large formats.
Yep. Phones don’t have the highest resolution cameras. They’re fine for a letter-sized document, but you’d get something pretty low-res (low DPI) if you tried to scan a bigger document, like the OP’s, all in a single shot.
It’s the same reason they take thousands of shots and stitch them together into a gigapixel photo, e.g. World's Largest & Highest Resolution Photo of New York City