Quality of back issues

Has anyone else had trouble with what I assume is the poor quality of the scanning of the ME back issues.

I have downloaded a few issues because there are constructional articles and drawings of models of interest to me. However the text and drawing scan quality is so poor that the typed text is just about readable, and I can't make out the drawing dimensions or text. Surely the point of the having the back issues is to be able to use them, not have to purchase the back issues just for legible information?

Can you give a couple of issue numbers and the page in question and I'll take a look.

Some of the earlier ones are not as good as the more recent but I have usually been able to read them.

Ok thanks

Issue 4404, pages 636/637 in particular

Issue 4165 page 130/131 in particular

I think in both cases it is the quality of the original that is causing the problems, neither of these are the in house artwork.

The Hewson drawings have been reduced down to A4 from the originals which were probably A1 or maybe A2, Looking at the actual printed mag the smaller type is not that easy to read anyway.

Similar with the radial, this uses the original hand drawn ink drawings, which look to have been reduced by 50% to get them in the mag so a few more file type conversions, cleaning up the "dirt" from the tracing/dyeline, etc will have degraded the images.

If you compare these drawings with say the Darjeeling in the next issue 4405 which is in house artwork you will see that they reproduce perfectly well so it is not a problem with the quality of the actual archive but the artwork that was used in the original printed mag.

Where commercial drawings are available it is always best to use the ones in the mag as a guide and get the real thing if you are actually building.

J

I think it's pretty much as Jason says, the main problem being that the older issues are physical scans of magazines, while the more recent issues are generated direct from the electronic data.

If the original drawings are less than perfect then scanning with reduction in resolution for monitor display doesn't help.

Neil

Hi,  https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/albums/member_photo.asp?a=28515&p=808365
Regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 21/07/2018 12:57:40

Hi A G, saving the scans and printing them, that I uploaded, doesn't give very good results. If you PM me an email, I will email you back with a PDF of all three.

Regards Nick.