We Close Our Eyes & Still See Stamps.

Rod thanks for showing us your data base decimal collection. From this I am setting up a table with one example of each stamp that we are having trouble finding. It will add some more excitement to the whole process as somebody finds one they will know themselves instead of me saying I think that is a hard one to find. Every little bit helps! Thanks again John and Family!

600dpi BeeSee I find that to be the best all round
size to "fly speck"
ACDSee opens up the scan at full screen, and you can drill down if need be.
I save all mine as *.jpg so a 2.5Mb scan becomes compressed to 170Kb, 130--200Kb is about the size I want all my pics.

You would have to get specialist advice re saving as *.bmp against
a *.jpg file, as I do not know the specifics.

340,000 images and files take up around 26Gb as far as I can remember.

Hope this helps

That's really reasonable use of disk space... I'm thinking it would take me a year or two to scan every stamp I've got, though... and then I could start on the covers!

-Allen

Yes, I think so, especially with the cost of HHD space at a premium
(1 terabyte for around $130)

This is the guy that got me hooked,
about 11 years ago when I started
I found the entire US Scott catalogue in images on the web,
and I found it a joy, to be able to identify and
sort my US stamps in a real jiffy, and it also gave me an overview
of the whole US catalogue by scrolling through the pages.

He removed the images about a week later, after a letter from Scott
with a "cease and desist" order.

I thought then, if I wasn't allowed to use his images,
then I would make my own.
Here is an example of his page number 1, not that I would have any of those.



Another benefit of scanning comes when you collect
the more difficult peculiarities on issues, Tony Mac's
indian states is a fine example how we are priveleged to
see stamps we normally wouldn't appreciate in our normal collecting sphere.

Here are some Indian "duplicates" that Jubilee just sent me,
that were real treasures for me, because they are further
examples for my Indian "theft prevention" collection
In a stock book you would never pick the occurences out,
but scanning highlights them marvelously.

"STAMPED" hand written text, and the first ever seen by me a
rubber boxed "STAMPED"

Thanks for the resolution information Rod. I had been using 300dpi for most, and 600dpi for some, then I just "saved as" and downsized them for my websites. But I think it is better to have one size for all, and for now on I will do all at 600dpi, then downsize as required. We should all do that and perhaps have an "industry standard", which is great for "trading".

As for JPG vs BMP, BMP is almost useless as they do not compress, the files are always much bigger.

I am in agreeance there BeeSee,
I would be interested in your result in scanning a standard format
stamp (say a GB KG5) and seeing what compression you get
saving as a *.jpg.

I used to get an image from Tony Mac that was ginormous,
say 2 Mb, I would open in ACDSee and save, it would drop
immediately to 250Kb, without apparent loss of clarity.
That always intrigued me why Tony's image software didn't do that.

BTW my scanner does 30-50 stamps in one hit,
I lay say 40 stamps on the platten, circle them with the carousel
then hit "scan all", it scans the 40 stamps at 600dpi, in 40 passes
whilst I have a cup of tea and a sticky bun.

Rodney, most graphics program will have a setting for the amount of compression used during the JPEG calculations. A .BMP file is huge because it doesn't lose any information (and because it uses a rather unsophisticated method of representing the data), so each pixel is always coloured exactly the same no matter how many times you resave the file (lossless compression). But a .JPG file uses lossy compression, in which the pixel data is approximated and some info is lost. If you have your program set for high compression, a lot of data is lost and the image looks blocky. Tony will have his scans saved with a low amount of compression, retaining the image data more accurately than with your setting, which trades some accuracy for a big saving in disk space.

For example, I've taken your Indian cancels and resaved them with a higher amount of compression. The original 75 KB file is now only 30 KB, but the detail is somewhat lacking. I know you like to toggle between two photos to see minor changes - try that with these two, and you'll see a difference, subtle in some places and obvious in others. It's especially obvious around the yellow text.

The Wikipedia articles on the JPG and BMP image formats are excellent, if you're interested in the math at the twiddly-bit level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format

Ryan

yes, I can see the difference just in the normal 600dpi
and the size I have to compress to get down to SCF 90Kb

I've played around with all sorts of matrixes, 600 dpi
and 80% quality seemed the best.

Do you have any suggestions?

I am happy to trade off the quality of the BMP with disk space,
my bottom line were the hairs on the perfs, if I could see those
then the depth was sufficient.

I have tried higher dpi with *.jpg with no discernible advantage.

However the dpi of 300 of BeeSee and 600dpi is a quantum shift.

I've usually used a 70% quality, so we're close there. I'll drop it down to 40% when I'm e-mailing something that's not too important. Line graphics / fonts are affected at quality that low, though, so it depends on what it is I'm sending. I've never used 100% quality for stamps.

Ryan

Sometimes I almost believed myself that I "had a problem with stamps" but then I met you folks here on the forum..i am fairly normal after all !

Yay, welcome to the club Phil

As we have kept doing the sorting of Aust dec., a more efficient system has emerged & we would like to share it.



This image is of the 45c, 50c & 55c. The vast majority of Aust dec., is in the 45c 50c denominations. We were filling the table with these stamps & when a lot of piles of stamps were quite high the 2 sets of stockbooks were used to clear the table for a fresh start. This created a couple of problems. The first was that by starting new piles we had to remember a new system for where the stamps were placed.

Second: hard to get stamps were in small numbers, which mean that we would have to go through the stockbooks at least another 10 or 12 times.

Third: it stopped the sorting of stamps while the stockbooks were being filled.

Now this area stays the same & we farm the stamps. Many of the stamp piles contain sets of 5 ~ 6 & up to 20 stamps. So as the piles get too high they are removed, except for 1 or 2 , & the pile of stamps is put into small plastic zip~lock bags. This is allowing hard to get stamps to build up into numbers where only one more sweep through the 2 sets of stockbooks needs to happen & that part will be done. The rest of the stamps are being prepared for packet making.

On the front edge of this image is a space set aside for the other denomination that come out in the process of stamp sorting.

The footwear that can be seen is my winter footwear. The large belly, in my defence, is because there is no feeling in this area, the result of nerve damage & mesh has been sewn in to hold everything together.

This image is of the containers that hold the different denominations that are harvested from the stamp farming table. When one container fills I sort it on another table for packet marking. Also on this section there is the Christmas & QEII stamps in sorted piles for farming.



This is the sorting table. About half a kg of stamps at a time is the best size for the sorters at one time. A pre~dec & world container is in use in this area as well. With this new sorting system the stamps processed has increased by over 100%. I do not think it could be more efficient than what is happening now.

KGV John and family,

You guys are amazing! Every time I come back and look at your work and now your new system and the piles and piles of sorted and organized stamps I am amazed.

I want to go and get going on my own tubs of assorted stamps and covers. Usually I just groan when I think of it.

I must print this out and hang it as inspiration next to my work table.

Thanks for sharing all your pictures and work.

What belly? You call that a belly!?

Doug

i am going to call one of those "hoarder" TV shows and have them come film at my house !!