Just some thoughts on scanning magazines. I found a guy in England that scans all kinds of stuff and sells it on DVD, so I got his DVDs for Model Railroader from 1934 to 2000. I had also bought the Model Railroader "update" DVD which has 2010 to 2019, so I needed to scan 2001 thru 2009 myself. Well, the England guys stuff isn't as good a quality as I had hoped, and his "trademark" that is plastered on the first page of every months issue is a racy sexually suggestive photo of a woman. So I decided that I need to scan my entire collection of Model Railroaders myself for 2 reasons. First is that I want a good enough scan resolution that I can blow things up on the screen a little and see details, and also because I don't want all the stinking full page ads in the pdf files...and I don't need my wife wondering what I am looking at on the computer with some hot woman showing up every time you click on a magazine issue. So experimenting with it I have found that the best trade off for quality vs file size ends up with each months issue being about 1 gigabyte in size, give or take a little depending on how many pages there were.
In the meantime, I also ordered the "official" DVD of the "every issue of Mainline Modeler". I am very disappointed in the scan quality of that. The page scans are much worse than the England guys scans. They don't even look good NOT blown up in size on the screen. So I am unsure whether to ruin all my MM's to scan them or to just sell off the DVD on Ebay and forget that.
Oh, and I quickly discovered that using scissors to cut the pages so they will go through the sheet feeder is a real bummer. Utility knife is better but not much. So I got one of those paper cutters that has the blade come down pretty much straight onto whatever you are cutting(NOT the old school scissors type with the blade on the long arm that swings down) and it is slick. It lops off the binding/staples no problem and cuts cleanly through the whole mag at once. You can cut 3 or 4 mags at a time with it but that causes some issues I didn't want to deal with.
The "official" 75 year Model Railroader collection still come up on Ebay every so often and goes for around $150. But from reading messages of people who have it, there are some issues with it for some people. But even if it worked just like the 10-19 "update" DVD does that I have, I do not like the interface of it. You can load it on your hard drive, but it is not like you can just click on an issue and read it. You have to click on a year and then that takes you to a screen that has the issues for that year that you can click on. After reading that issue, you can't go directly to the next one or anything, you have to start over again to get where you want to be, so it is not that handy. AND it has all the full page ads that you have to skip over while reading it too.
