Aperture Cards
1928
the first full length talking picture opens, Emelia Erhart becomes the first woman to fly the Atlantic and...
... IBM invents the 80 column punched card - the techology on which the Aperture Card is based.
[1928 is also the year in which Mickey Mouse makes his first appearance on the big screen and TV sets go on sale for the first time. The Graf Zeppelin ushers in a new age of mass travel (well... almost). In London, Alexander Fleming's paper on penicillin is published and D.H. Lawrence's famously erotic novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover.... isn't.]
Not a lot of people know that. One thing that most people who still use Aperture Cards do know, is that they have their limitations...
Aperture Cards combine an 80 column punched card with a 35mm transparency. Typically, they are used to store blueprints and engineering drawings. You need an optical viewer to look at them and an expensive piece of kit to print them out. Some cards have rudimentary index information punched on them and some do not have even that.
Time to change?
Preview offers a large-format scanning service that enables you to capture all your aperture cards digitally and even add or amend the contents on-screen via your network or our on-line eView+ service.
| The Problem with Aperture Cards... | ... and the Preview Solution |
| Access is restricted to one person at a time and the viewer is in the basement of your drawing office! | Anyone in your organisation can access drawings on your network (or on-line using our eView+ secure web repository). |
| You need to manually view many cards before you find the ones you are looking for. | Digitised drawings can be indexed, searched and retrieved instantly. |
| Drawings held on optical cards can't be amended. | Digitised drawings can be amended using any proprietary image editing tool. |
| You need an expensive dedicated reader/printer, or the cards need to be sent away for printing. | Scanned images can be viewed on any PC and printed on any suitable printer. |
| You understand the benefits but the cost of replacing all you aperture cards for occasional access just doesn't seem worth the trouble. | Preview's unique Scan on Demand service means that we scan only the drawings that you need, when you need them. |
So, what's stopping you?
If it's the perception that there is a high up-front cost of migrating to a digital solution, think again... Preview's Flexiscan plan means that you can scan all your cards free and spread the cost over 12 months. Preview can even offer you a cash back on your old reader/printer to offset the costs!
Call Preview now on 020 8755 5707 and join hundreds of companies who have streamlined, reduced costs and gained huge benefits from digital access.
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