IDEAL recently took on the Wicks & Wilson C-250 ACS Aperture Card Scanner in our product line. This is a great little ACS for fast, high volume scanning of aperture card based engineering drawings and scientific documents. Why scan aperture cards? Some people scan them for use in conversion to CAD; some, for an easier way to archive and retrieve in a Product Data Management (PDM) application. Without getting hung-up on technical details, the Wicks & Wilson C-250 can scan ISO aperture cards at 350 cards per hour at 200 dpi and 250 cards per hour at 400 dpi, so you can get some pretty good production out of this little beauty, especially if you take advantage of the batch processing feature. As far as I know, the ACS C-250 offers the highest, truest resolution in its price class.
I like to recommend storing scanned aperture card files (and scanned large format drawings) on www.MyArchiveCenter.com. What’s the advantage to storing your data on a site like MyArchiveCenter.com? First and foremost is the immediate availability of your drawings via a web browser, and it’s protected with Level 3 security, so your drawings are accessible only to those whom you have authorized. This is one archiving solution that also has nearly instantaneous viewing, a feature that’s absolutely necessary when you’re dealing with large format files.
If you think online archiving is something you’d like to try, I recommend starting with a pilot project. For information about www.myarchivecenter.com or to set up a pilot project, contact me at idealblog@ideal.com.
