Scor­pio News

full 300 dpi, but they are comparatively slow and cost a bomb. Lastly come the big (approximately) A3 size displays. Resolution varies, but is usually reduced from the original, more on speed grounds than on cost. Those which show the full resolution look superb but, brother, are they slow !!

Manipulating the image.

A point is sometimes raised as to whether the image can be manipulated. That depends on what you mean by manipulation. Sure, you could expand the picture to look at a part of it in full detail. If it was a small display screen you could shrink it to see the whole image in reduced detail, you could turn it sideways or upside down. None of these things change the image: stored in the computer, they simply manipulate the way you see it. Now if your idea of manipulation at this stage is to enhance the image, that to my way of seeing things is naughty. It’s only too easy for the software writer to provide tools to allow you to ‘tidy up’ the image. Perhaps not a bad idea if it has scanned badly and areas are smudgy or indistinct, but these self same tools could also be used to add or delete things and at this stage any modifications would be invisible on the final stored result. The whole idea of imaging systems is to store documentation and this is best stored warts and all. There’s always the touchy subject of ‘legal admissibility’, where documents might have to be produced in some legal proceedings. Now the way the law stands at present, documentation submitted must be ‘best available evidence’. If the original paperwork has been destroyed, then the best available evidence is the images, and if it can be proved that it is not possible to tamper with the original images before storage, this stands a far greater chance of being legally admissible than something that has been ‘tidied up’.

On the other hand, ‘tidying up’ an image is not a bad idea and might be vitally necessary to enhance obscure detail or something. So the imaging system could allow ‘tidying up’ after it has safely and irrevocably tucked the original away unaltered. That way the original is untouched, but a second copy could be enhanced in any way that was required, that’s why automatic date and time stamping becomes an important feature of the system.

Legal Admissibility.

Just a few points about the legality of documents stored in an imaging system. In law the only legally admissible evidence is the original, even carbon copies of an original are doubtful and any form of machine generated facsimile of the original is even more doubtful. However, to work the law must be ‘reasonable’ and as I have said, actually works on the basis of ‘best available evidence’. For instance, it is assumed in the microfilm world that microfilmed documents are legally admissible, this is not so, simply that microfilmed documents may be the best available evidence under given circumstances. There have been test cases to prove it on the grounds