PHOTOGRAPHING RECORDS

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 January 1939, Page 7

PHOTOGRAPHING RECORDS

AUSTRALIAN SYSTEM CANBERRA, January 10. ’ An immense saving in the cost of reproducing copies of records and a great saving in the space required for storing them will be made possible by new jnicrophotographic recording equipment to be installed next week by the Commonwealth Statistician, Dr. Roland Wilson. The equipment will be the first ol its kind to be installed anywhere in Australia, although experiments with home-made equipment have been made by the Council for Scientific Research. The new equipment consists of a special camera which makes photographs on a cinematograph film. The camera is so designed that the page c£ a book, a diagram, or a sheet of statistical tables up to several feet square can be photographed on to the miniature film so perfectly that when the record is magnified again in a special projector, and if desired rephotographed, the copy is equal in every detail to the original. By means of the special camera a book of 500 pages can be photographed page by page in an hour. A complicated statistical table several feet square, which would cost between 30/ and £2 to copy on a typewriter, can be copied by the camera at a cost of about a halfpenny. At present, the Commonwealth Government sends a wide variety of comparatively little-used but important and complex tables to each of the State statists. The cost of copying them is now an important item, and the records when completed are so bulky that their storage introduces serious problems. If the State Governments install projectors these documents could be sent in the form of durable micro photographs at a fraction of the cost now involved in sending them on paper.