Questions and ideas for you or XXXX?

Questions and ideas for you or XXXX?

1)    Do you want to fight your spouse for the use of whatever you get? Best case can you share OK?

2)      The main choices, I think, are between an upright (like a smaller footprint) scanner or a flatbed type scanner (with a larger foot print)?

3)      Keep in mind most internet pics these days are at 72 and 96 dpi (dots per inch), and most scans you will do will most likely be at up to 150 to 300 dpi, so claims of higher dpi’s I am confident are true, but you will seldom use them  since more dpi’s equal larger file sizes. At a certain point, one even has to go from email sharing to using DVD’s to share.  Even if you have a high speed broadband connection, how well does the other side, or the connections in between, work.  Hopefully that is getting better, but right now I would not count on email to transmit any big size files.

4)      DVD’s come in many flavors these days, so be careful. It looks like the DVD-R format is winning out, but the issue is still up for grabs in my mind. And I would avoid any DVD read-write flavor, though they can work OK. In turn, I know a fellow in Athens, Georgia who lost a lot of paid work using older DVD read-write technology at the time, like 10 years ago. I once got a DVD movie from the History Channel in DVD+R format, and much of my gear at the Hemlocks could not read it.

5)      What are your requirements? Like it is just scanning legal documents (often 8.5 X 14), or also doing other things like Family Genealogy (often just old pics and fixing them up) and even business cards for Richard. Once people know you can do this, you may get abused by extraordinary requests. Now how you handle this is up to you. For example you can price yourself out of the market to cut down requests, or just take so long to get around to it your relatives may go to other sources.

6)      Use Amazon.com for your homework.

7)      I myself, but this is just myself, like the Epson V600 since things have improved since you did all the wonderful work in Franklin (Tennessee)  around 10 years ago. It can do legal scanning and Family genealogy OK, or so is advertised.

8)      I am confident whatever you choose will probably be surpassed in the future, so good enough and all in one (like legal documents and Family genealogy stuff) that we can get today is probably not a bad way to go.

9)      The usual learning curve on any of this stuff is around 3 to 6 months, too. Since Julie has a Family, I would consider longer, like a year’s learning curve.

10)  And the offer is not for a printer, but just some kind of scanner. Now when I did it for a living, I had a nice big printer, too, but that is another subject. In my case I had to use a plotter (aound $5K at the time, plus the supplies), vice a letter size printer (which I had, too), and the combination of both worked well for both mapping work and genealogy Family work.

11)   I had you use the jpeg, or jpg, format for the work you did in Franklin. Later a relative did much the same kind of work in Missouri for another estate settlement using the pdf format. That is what I would recommend in the future, though it is reasonable to think even pdf format will get superseded in our future. But for now, pdf is OK, I think, and most certainly there will be future ways to convert pdf to whatever format exists in the future, so I don’t think you are wasting your time. And if you stick with jpg, that will probably be OK, too.

12)  Last, when I spoke with John, I figured the cost of a scanner to be around $100. Well it may now be closer to $225, but that is still fine with me. That’s how a big a deal recording all this info is to me, and then I encourage sharing it.

13)  And as far as Family info goes, if in doubt I suggest just saying something like “believed to be” or “I recall” as better than saying nothing in pursuit of being perfectly accurate. Such I have shared with XXXX, and basically she blew me off, so there is another side to this issue, too. Now I try look at it like a 100 years from now, and what do the researchers then think.  Of course I do not know for sure.