photocopies
Dec. 13th, 2008 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOne of my errands today involved a lot of photocopying, done at Kinko's, and this gives me a chance to give thanks for how much easier copies are to make than they used to be. I remember wet copying, which produced sheets of paper with the texture of oilcloth and printing in varying shades of grey. Let a pile of them sit in a humid environment for a while and they'd merge into an inseparable damp clump.
I also remember copiers with curved glass plates, because the camera rotated instead of slid as it recorded the image. This made it impossible to copy two facing pages of a bound volume at once.
Most of these machines were not too great at sealing the toner to the paper. Grimy hands and smudged copies were a common aftereffect.
Nor was the reproduction that precise. I tried an experiment on one of those machines: I copied a photograph from a book, then copied the copy, and so on. By the tenth generation it was a series of abstract dots completely unrecognizable as a photo.
All these problems have long since been solved. When I need to copy pages from a rare book, the copy will be as crisp and precise as the original - sometimes better, for if the paper of the original is browning, the copier can null that out and produce a white background.
Another thing I really like about the current photocopiers at Kinko's is their computer memory. If I wish to make back-to-back copies, I can have the machine shoot the images of a large number of originals before pressing the "Done" button and have it make all the copies at once. I've done as many as 50 pages that way in one session, and I could do more, except I want to double-check the results before going much further.
And much else. The one thing I don't like is accumulating copy cards from academic institutions I visit rarely. The cards usually cost 50 cents as a starter fee, and when I come back years later I either can't find the card or it's been replaced by a different card and the turn-in period is long expired. Still, it's usually cheaper than coins.
Which reminds me: bill-readers on the copy machines and/or the card vendors. Something else we didn't use to have.
I also remember copiers with curved glass plates, because the camera rotated instead of slid as it recorded the image. This made it impossible to copy two facing pages of a bound volume at once.
Most of these machines were not too great at sealing the toner to the paper. Grimy hands and smudged copies were a common aftereffect.
Nor was the reproduction that precise. I tried an experiment on one of those machines: I copied a photograph from a book, then copied the copy, and so on. By the tenth generation it was a series of abstract dots completely unrecognizable as a photo.
All these problems have long since been solved. When I need to copy pages from a rare book, the copy will be as crisp and precise as the original - sometimes better, for if the paper of the original is browning, the copier can null that out and produce a white background.
Another thing I really like about the current photocopiers at Kinko's is their computer memory. If I wish to make back-to-back copies, I can have the machine shoot the images of a large number of originals before pressing the "Done" button and have it make all the copies at once. I've done as many as 50 pages that way in one session, and I could do more, except I want to double-check the results before going much further.
And much else. The one thing I don't like is accumulating copy cards from academic institutions I visit rarely. The cards usually cost 50 cents as a starter fee, and when I come back years later I either can't find the card or it's been replaced by a different card and the turn-in period is long expired. Still, it's usually cheaper than coins.
Which reminds me: bill-readers on the copy machines and/or the card vendors. Something else we didn't use to have.
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Date: 2008-12-19 12:32 pm (UTC)