I'm not really sure if this should go in this section or another....

For those of us who enjoy the artwork on the covers (or those who wish to make proper catalogues?), have you ever scanned them to preserve them?

If so, what is the best recommended scanner model? Large scanners for anything larger than common legal documents are harder to find these days. Do they even have a modern oversized flatbed scanner (eBay would suggest no, but perhaps?)???

Even A3 scanners will be short of ~1cm for a standard LD cover.
You will need to make 2 scans and use some sticking/overlap software to join both together.

Flatbed A2 scanners look very big/heavy and probably just insanely expensive!

Julien

I never do this but if I did I would honestly just use a very well placed and lit shot from a good camera. When I was a digital graphics technician and I scanned stuff all day for a living that would have been an unfunny joke but cameras have come a long way. I'm sure my SLR could show you the grain in the paper of an LD sleeve if you shot it right.

Seems bizarre that in 2017 we still do not have an economical scanner intended for home use which is able to accomidate LPs, LaserDiscs and oversized comics.

Same here. Scanning all the covers of my movie collection has been an ongoing project for me for at least 10 years, but the most beautiful covers, those of the laserdiscs, still pose as much of an unsolved problem as ever.

For a moment I thought a mouse scanner could be the solution; turned out those available don't go beyond A3 format (insufficient for lasers!) either.

Scanning it twice and stitching it together seriously isn't that hard. You can do it by hand in Gimp.

I wouldn't mind stitching two images together, if I could get two scans of the cover lying perfectly flat on the glass. In my experience, there is always a plastic lip along at least one end of the scanner which causes one end of the LD cover to pop up (ever so slightly), which causes some distortion to the scanned image.

To avoid as much distortion as possible, I end up making 4 seperate scans and then stitching them all together just to accomplish one LD cover image. At which point, I quickly loose interest in continuing on to the next LD.

Making pictures easier would be great

I'm planning on trying to do this at my place of work as our copiers double as scanners with large flatbeds (of course, over the weekend so people don't wonder what they hell I'm doing.)

I'll share my results here.

Thank you all for the input! I greatly appreciate it.



Looking forward to those results.

Unfortunately, it won't work for LD.

When trying to scan an LD cover, it keeps wanting me to specify a document size before scanning it. So that way won't work.

Can't you just force A3 or A2 scanning manually?

Julien

This guide here is quite good for taking photos of covers:

http://lpcoverlover.com/how-to-take-dec ... rd-albums/

Okay, I tried again with a different model copier and was able to input a custom size for the scan. Unfortunately, you can't quite get a full scan of an LD as the scan area maxes out at 16" x 11-11/16". Still, it did come out exceptionally clean.