Kent has posted about fax machines and the degradation of legibility of documents. We, here in Georgia, are not a mandatory recording state except for subdivisions, condos, etc. Our Clerks of Superior Court now maintain a database of all documents filed for recording after a certain date (sorry I don't remember the date off the top of my head). They wanted a way for surveyors to submit plats for recording without them having to purchase and maintain scanners so they introduced legislation to require all plats submitted to be digital. Sounds good right. With SAMSOG reviewing and agreeing to the legislation it was submitted. At the LAST possible moment (without SAMSOG being made aware) it was revised to save the Clerks storage space and therefore money. As of January 1, 2017 all plats submitted will be required to be at 200 dpi. Yep, you read that right 200 dpi.
When the Legislature opens in January we WILL be offering alternate legislation to correct this OBVIOUSLY flawed legislation. If not corrected our future surveyors will be SOL on lots of subdivision plats.
Andy
Our agency has hundreds of thousand of images that were scanned at 200 DPI and the vast majority of them are OK. When the scanning process was started, which was about ten years ago, space was a major consideration. While I was not in favor of the 200 DPI it was better than nothing. Based on scans that I have seen, the 200 DPI works fine if the quality of the original image is good but as soon as that quality disappears the 200 DPI no longer cuts it. One of the problems with bumping the scans to 300 or 400 DPI or more is that the file sizes become exponential. Since space is not as much of an issue today we try to scan in-house documents at 300 or 400 DPI but may adjust it if the file sizes become to large, but our main office still scans at 200 DPI. Since storage space is not as big of an issue I think that it would be best if possible to scan at 300 or 400 DPI.
One of our local counties here was taken to the cleaners by a document scanning firm that did the same thing with over 100 years of existing records.. The results are completely unusable...
Printing a poor scan at 50% of original size is similat to doubling the DPI
The proceedure will not fix the distortion of a poor fax, that mess won't get better
Our guys scanned microfilm images and most of them are ok. But we have some scans of original maps that are pretty much useless. We currently use OCE never tear instead of mylars. The OCE has a white background and the black text and drawing really stands out which make the scans very legible. I have noticed that the mylars scans tend to be somewhat larger than the ones from the OCE never tear.
