Precision Scanning and Cad Services for paper, film & engineering

UW Sephardic Studies Preservation Book Scanning. In 2014, the Sephardic Studies program and the University of Washington embarked on a unique effort to digitize the largest collection of Ladino language texts. The goal of the project was one of preservation and largely one to create a collection of texts that could potentially result in a dictionary for a language which is in danger of extinction due to number of native speakers who were lost in the Holocaust. Perfect Image collaborated with the UW to digitize 445 bound texts yielding 100,246 images on site in six months. The texts were collected from private individuals collections who held the items with great personal concern for their care and preservation. Many of the owners visited the University to witness the preservation efforts and were delighted to see the care that was taken by our operator on the Atiz book scanner. The effort was documented at the following links with full texts to be published in the near future.

Turning memories into megabytes.
By the Numbers: Building the Sephardic Studies Digital Library.

What can be done with High Resolution Film Scans. Dann Hall has been the curator of the Ross Hall Photographic collection for many years and recently embarked on a effort to enlarge one of the the panoramics to fill a room. We are proud to have been part of the effort and are elated to see the magnificent results. The original panoramic spanned two negatives each measuring 12.5inx19in. We were able to capture the originals on our Heidelberg Drum Scanner at 10,000 dpi (See the Video). The separates were merged in Photoshop to create a seamless panoramic. The final prints mounted on the wall look outstanding. Please visit the Ross Hall collection for more information on this Northwest Treasure.

Perfect Image Wins Maui County On Site Paper Scanning Contract. July 2015, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan 500k images onsite in Wailuku for the County Recorder. The project is slated to run from August through November of 2015.

Perfect Image Wins Snohomish County Film Scanning Contract. June 2015, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan 1.8M images of public records from roll micorfilm for Snohomish County. Not only were we 30% lower cost then the next vendor (from 16 bids) we are slated to complete the project in half the time. Not only is the customer elated to have a local vendor, their initial review of the Nextscan equipment and the quality it produces compared to County Mekel scanners makes them confident that the project will be an outstanding success

Perfect Image Wins Santa Clara Valley Water District Fiche Scanning Contract. January 2015, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan 1.6M images from microfiche for Santa Clara Valley Water District. The project includes 16mm and 35mm frames and is expected to be completed in smaller lots over the course of a year.

Perfect Image Wins Iowa PERB Fiche Scanning Contract. January 2015, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan 31k microfiche for the Iowa Public Employee Relations Board. The project is expected to start in February and take a few weeks to scan an estimated 834k images from 16mm microfiche.

Perfect Image Wins Army Corps Galveston, TX. September 2014, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan 50k microfiche on site in Galveston, TX. We drove our scnaner and staff to the Army Corps facility and were up and running the first day. The project started in October 2014 and we expect the project to be complete in March of 2015.

Perfect Image Wins County of Maui Book Scanning Award. February 2014, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan approximately 100k pages from 70 recorders books on site in Wailuku, Maui. We will be transporting our Atiz Book Scanner to a facility adjacent to the recorders office for approximatley six to eight weeks of book scanning. We were the only vedor offering to scan on the island of Maui.

Perfect Image Wins City of Chattanooga Film and Fiche Award. February 2014, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan just over 1 million images from roll film and microfiche. We were selected from a pool of over 25 service bureaus responding with the most favorable solution for the City.

Recent News: Heidelberg Drum Scanner Acquired. Noveber 2013 This unit is one of the most precise color film and reflective scanners available. The unit is old but unmatched in capture quality. Scans of film and reflective material up to 17x22 at 18k DPI. Likely one of two units of its type on the West Coast. This unit once belonged to Getty Images and is primarly used to create very precise reprocutions from film and print for reproduction as full page magazine spreads or billboards.

Sample Scans and Digital Panoramic Restoration

Hosted Ribbon Files. July 2012, Perfect Image, Inc. In an effort to support numerous customers who have expressed frustration over the costs to convert microfilm, microfiche and bound books, Perfect Image, Inc. is deploying hosted ribbon technologies to provide a quick and inexpensive solution to access these formats. The solution works very well for archives that are organized sequentially as it eliminates the need to index every record and can reduce the total conversion cost by 50% or more. While we have been providing traditional hosting of derrivatives across many millions of records, we know that this technology will fill a gap that has been missing in our industry. A hosted ribbon solution allows an enourmous archive to be published and searchbale within days of scanning and allows full record indexing as time and budget allow. Since the data is hosted as a ribbon, the entire content is avialble prior to frame detection and cropping. This allows Perfect Image, Inc. to guarantee 100% of every frame or page is fully detected and presented to the user. For a detailed description of ribbon scanning technology please reference our technical discussions folder for Ribbon Scanning.

Fiche Autoloader Acquired in support of ILSRS. February 2012, Perfect Image, Inc. won a one year contract to convert over 7M images from paper and 7M images from microfiche with an accuracy exceeding 99.95%. This is the fist customer that has opted for a 100% grayscale conversion. Grayscale scanning is a byproduct of our scanning process and a derivative monochrome version is published to the users in Docuware. The grayscale versions are kept on DVD until such time as the infrastructure and software fully support a grayscale archive. As of September we have completed 14 of the 21 Lektrievers and are on track to complete all of the paper scanning in early December, with the microfiche conversion due to finish in January 2013. The project includes capture of employee wage and medical records spanning many decades. Each page is reviewed for medical content so that sensitive medical records can be stored separator form general correspondence and wage information. The fiche loader was the eight unit installed by Nextscan and was necessary due to the production requirements and the unique "chipped" format of the fiche. Chipping is a technique used by agencies to "update" their member folders periodically. The updated are filmed on a roll and individual chips are cut and loaded into the fiche jackets. Duplicating and scanning chipped fiche is very challenging as the chips tend to float around, overlap each other and often fall completely out of the jackets. The existing vacuum base autoloaders are not appropriate for chipped fiche. We found that the pinch roller with gravity feet resulted in less risk of chips moving around in or out of the jackets. This unit has been running 24x7 since February 2011 with very little d own time.

Illinois Secretary of State Hosting Extension. January 2012, Perfect Image, Inc. won a five year extension to its contract to host over 50TB of data on its servers for the ILSOS. In 2008, Perfect Image designed a system that allowed the State to combine three State hosted repositories and two vendor hosted repositories into a single user interface. The system is servicing thousands of hits per day across many state sites and has grown to over 60M stored documents.

Sarah Palin Emails June 2011, That media frenzy over the Palin Emails, was made possible by our scanning efforts. In support of the FOIA release by the government of the Sara Palin emails on 10June2011, Perfect Image was asked to scan and OCR up to 24k pages of printed emails by the Washington Post. First to publish was a driving force for this effort and recognizing this, Perfect Image suggested on-site scanning in Juneau, AK at the Baranof Hotel, across the street from the Government Offices where the documents were produced. Under the direction of Washington Post Staff our operator scanned and OCR'd 24k pages in just under 7 hours. The OCR'd and text searchable PDF files were FTP'd as each batch was completed to Washington, DC and posted to the Post's site within hours of receiving the originals. Users can search any keyword across all 24k pages at the Washington Post's site: Washington Post Palin Emails additional links to the media frenzy can be seen at the following addresses: Media Photos Media Blog

WA Department of Licensing Driver Guide Replication. June 2011, Perfect Image, Inc. won a multi year and multi agency award for CD replication. The first project involved an effort by the Department of Licencing to remove all paper copies of the Washington State Driver Guide from all State Driver Licensing Offices. The first order was 45k CDs delivered in 12 days. Perfect Image was contracted to setup the CD user interface, providing digital access to guides in multiple languages. The digital production guide can be accessed from the following link: WA DOL Driver Guides

Bookscanner Acquisition in support of the Newton Free Library. March 2011, Perfect Image, Inc. Acquired a Kirtas APT 2400 robotic bookscanner. The scanner was installed on site at the Newton Free Library in Newton, MA. We converted 24k pages of data from bound City Directories dating back to the mid 1800s. The source material was in a very challenged state with many broken bindings, loose and torn pages. The scanning was performed on site in 4 days with images audited and delivered within one week. All of the imagery was output to 35mm film using Electron Beam Recorders in grayscale.

Bookscanner Upgrade to support the State of Minnesota. November 2010. In support of a recent award with the Minnesota Historical Society, Perfect Image, Inc. has upgraded its bookscanner with new Canon EOS Mark II camera bodies and EF 100mm lenses. The camera upgrade allows us to scan large format newspaper (20x22) at a higher resolution and the lens upgrade allows us to scan small field notebooks at more than 600dpi in full color. Initial Details of the MNHS project can be found at the MNGEO site. The project involves high resolution color planetary scanning of 1400 field survey books from the mid 1800s. The project is expected to yield over 310k images and provide an accurate and legal archive of the initial land grants for the State of Minnesota.

Perfect Image Wins Bureau of Land Management Award. October 2009, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan up to 500k images from Aperture Card for the Oregon Bureau Land Management as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The cards contain filming of the orginal land grants for the westward expansion across the United States in the mid 1800's.

Perfect Image wins NDNP award. January 2010. Perfect was awarded a contract with the Montana Historical Society to convert 50,000 pages of legacy microfilm frames from 35mm film. The project is part of the National Digital Newspaper Project, where a number of Universities and Historical Societies are funded to convert legacy newspapers of merit. The specifications require up to 400dpi grayscale scanning with full page OCR (optical character recognition) The Library of Congress (LOC) designed and implemented a very complex set of deliverables to insure the integrity of the data and to guarantee that the data is non-proprietary for its use many years in the future. Perfect Image designed its own OCR engine based on the ABBYY engine to meet the enormous quantity of metadata required of the ALTO format. Our engine is only one of two known to meet these requirements. The metadata is xml formatted to include very detailed information about the conversion, including the positional coordinates of each word and its conversion confidence. This level of detail is required by the LOC to insure that the data is usable even if the viewers (like acrobat) become extinct. This project will continue though the fourth quarter of 2010. The First images have been posted to the LOC site and can be browsed at ChroniclingAmerica

Perfect Image Wins CalSTRS Award - 13 Million Images. March 2009, Perfect Image was awarded a contract to scan approximately 13M images from COM fiche for the State of California Teachers Retirement System. The contract required 100% frame by frame review and analysis where grayscale frames were substituted for poor quality originals. The project was started in October of 2009 and completed May of 2010. The images required 100% Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Perfect Image designed a Central OCR Server utilizing 30 client processing machines running 24x7 for the entire term of the contract. The ABBYY OCR engine was deployed with great success and performance. Perfect Image exceeded the accuracy and performance expectations for the duration of the contract.

Perfect Image lands in Perth, Australia. April 2009, Perfect Image was awarded a contract with the Government of Western Australia, Department of Planning to scan over 4.5M images from 16mm and 35mm microfilm. Slated to be complete by July 2009 the contract included 100% frame verification, indexing by parcel id and remote QC from our Washington and Connecticut offices. The Department had a unique requirement to scan over 5000 frames of color microfilm, previously thought to have only existed in Japan from WWII. The project manager selected Perfect Image because of our competitive pricing, superior solution and most importantly our ability to perform the scanning on site. This is our second project performed outside of the US and our first overseas.

Perfect Image Wins a contract with the Illinois Secretary of State. February 2008. In an effort to centralize their repository, the Illinois Secretary of State awarded a contract to Perfect Image, Inc. for the design and deployment of a 25 Terabyte Document Repository. The system is mirrored across the US and supports over 60M documents. The system is designed for speed. A simple user interface yields search results exceeding 10K results in seconds. The system allowed the State to combine three State hosted repositories and two vendor hosted repositories into a single user interface

Perfect Image Acquires two Nextscan Flexscan Fiche/Film Scanners with Nextstar. June 2008 & March 2009, we recently added two scanners to our service offerings. These units are more portable than other film scanning units and have the latest Ribbon Scanning technology called Nextstar.The units have interchangeable modules that allow us to scan Fiche, Film and Aperture Card. The Nextstar software and server allow us to guarantee 100% data capture and provide remote QC, further reducing the costs and improving the quality for our customers.

Perfect Image Acquires a DRS Production Fiche Scanner. October 2005, we have added the best technology available for fiche scanning. Acquired from DRS in Germany, this unit automaticaly loads fiche from a hopper of up to 200 items. The optics and transport system, combined with its ability to run unattended for up to 24hrs, allows us to provide very economical and accurate fiche scanning to our customer base.


Perfect Image, Inc. - Precision Scanning and CAD Services