Hi!
Quote:
I know the company you are referring to - or at least I know their products, sold on various CDs for many years. I have to disagree with you that these are "high quality copies". These are the cheapest possible scans, in fact automated scans, where everything is black and white, even when images demand at least greyscale, and sometimes colour. And often the resolution is so poor that critical detail is lost from things like schematics.
These copies are a prime example of what motivated me to start doing the job properly back in 2002 for the vmars archive. I worked out how to get high resolution scans, while keeping the file size moderate - back in those days before the advent of fast internet, the file size was pretty important. And the repeated stamping of the company name all over the copy makes the product anything but "high quality"!
To emphasise the commercial motivation behind this production, the huge range of equipments claimed to be on some CDs, is also a con - usually there is one manual, which is then claimed to cover a myriad of variants and similar models - all separately listed of course - to impress the customers. I have complained about this directly to the company concerned in the past, having spent money to get a manual claimed to be on a CD, only to find that it wasn't.
To my mind these copies are the last resort of the desperate. Of course, in some cases its the only copy of manual available anywhere - so they can claim to be providing some sort of service. But lets be clear that its pretty second rate by the standards set in the last 15 years - and much of the material is not only free now, it has been offered free since the day it came off the scanner.
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I'm entirely in agreement!
Tha quality of their manuals varies from dubious to absolutely appalling, and it got to the point where said firm refused to take any orders from me, because I sent back parcels of paper that looked like spiders had been dipped in toner and left to scuttle all over the paper, along with a not-pleased letter explaining why I couldn't read it!
I don't want to pay a lot of money for a diagram that has to be redrawn all over again from scratch!
I wanted a Service Manual for a Ferguson 3922 Music Centre a year or two ago, and found it on a site whose main features are a very dark green background - the manual was almost £20 but what arrived was a high quality scan of Thorn/BRC's original work with all the small component values all clearly readable, no furry lettering anywhere and the "see-through" views of PCBs all really well done with all the tracks a consistent shade of light grey!
Some of BRC's earlier 1970s audio manuals were sometimes done in two colours - I've not bought any copies of these but I once had a few where the PCB tracks were a lightly stippled use of the second colour used on the manual - I've seen yellow, orange, emerald-green, light blue, purple and red over the years!
Chris Williams