Last month was a big one for our microfilm division at ST Imaging, which just launched its new ViewScan 5 digital microfilm reader. It’s the first major model release for STI since the ViewScan 4 debuted in June 2017, capping an eight-year run as our flagship microfilm reader.
There are some big changes in the new model, but the most notable difference is that the camera and the light source have switched places. On previous ViewScan models, the film passed over a glass panel and was illuminated from below, while the camera took the image from above, at the end of a metal arm. The VS5 has the camera underneath the glass and the light shining from the arm above, which actually makes several things easier when it comes to installation and operation.
Mainly, the camera is better protected from accidental damage, either from stray bumps and bangs in its exposed position on the arm, or from people lifting up the unit by the arm itself (you would be amazed at how often that happens). It also makes the VS5 much easier to service. On earlier models, the first step when you needed to access the internal components was always to disconnect and remove the camera arm – fine if the issue was with the camera, but less appealing if it was anything else.
If you want to know more about the new model, you can check it out at www.stimaging.com. But if you’re like a lot of our visitors who know us mostly by our check scanners, it might surprise you to know that Digital Check started out as a microfilm company, and worked with various types of film for almost 40 years before we had anything to do with banking!
Seven decades working with microfilm: A brief history
We were incorporated in 1959 under the name Microseal, and our first product was a microfilm aperture card with a piece of protective plastic covering the film (competitors at the time made cards that left the film exposed). From then on, our business included various forms of microfilm holders, or jackets, cameras for creating microfilm, and similar products all the way until 1994, when we sold the film business, along with the Microseal name, and went all-in on digital.
But five years after we got out of microfilm, we got right back in by acquiring ST Imaging, which makes up one half of our microfilm division today alongside nextScan, which was acquired in 2015. But this time, we were on the opposite side of the fence – using digital equipment to read the film or convert it to electronic format.
It may sound like a sneaky move to sell you the equipment to make microfilm, then turn around and sell you the equipment that converts it back, but over a 50-year timeframe, it’s more a reflection on the state of current technology. Back when we were selling cameras to make microfilm, the equipment was state-of-the-art – so much that NASA even used it to make pictures from the data sent back by space probes!
Similarly, the stuff that’s used today for digitizing old film is at the bleeding edge of what even modern computing can support. One of our high-speed machines can convert 100 feet of microfilm per minute, taking hundreds of thousands of single-pixel slices; another wide-format film scanner captures 1.5 gigabytes of data per second using multiple cameras. In many cases, the limitations of current computer hardware and software to transfer and write data have been tougher to solve than capturing the images themselves! Surprising as it may seem, though, microfilm’s run isn’t quite over, even as we’re digitizing tons of it.
Why are people still using microfilm in 2025?
You may be shocked to learn that, in addition to the mountains of microfilm and fiche sitting in archives that haven’t been digitized, people are actually creating MORE of the stuff even today. What?
As it turns out, even though digital storage has the reputation of being “future-proof,” without constant maintenance, it’s anything but permanent. Since computers became widespread in the 1980s, mass storage has undergone several major changes to formats and standards, to the point where you may not even be able to access the data you stored 15 or 20 years ago if you haven’t transferred it once or twice since then. Even though digital is the unquestioned standard for daily access, in some cases where true long-term preservation is the goal, we’ve started seeing some archivists use long-life microfilm to back up the electronic copies. Talk about coming full circle!
To all the readers out there who didn’t know we got our start in microfilm, we hope this has been an interesting look at where we came from, as well as what’s happening today. For a “dead-end” storage format, there’s still a lot going on!
