I’ve had a stack of fiche and a number of rolls of microfilms sitting around doing nothing for a decade and more due to a lack of ability to get good images off ’em. Every scanner I came across out in the wild would only do two-bit black-and-white scans, which turned the already dubious image quality into useless mush; efforts to capture the images via photography were roughly equally useless. Fortunately, at long last, I found that the University library up in Logan has microform scanners that do proper grayscale. So today I blew a number of hours digging through some old periodicals (“Space World”) and making scans. At last I can get half-ass decent copies of a whole bunch of German V-2 diagrams, among other things.
The image quality still kinda blows compared to good scans taken directly off the documents, but this is about as good as it’ll get for microfiche.