The Evolution of the Microfiche and the Modern Alternative – Microfiche Conversion
Microfiche, whilst being for a long time the industry standard for storing a bulk amount of larger scale documents such as drawings and blueprints, have been obsolete for a while now. Despite this, they have kept a certain fondness amongst many who have used them for years and years and even with relative newcomers. This might be something to do with the retro value of them or the fact that you’re actually looking at something that innovated by making something considerably smaller when things were very big indeed.
To this day, microfiche are still widely used and, as such, are still a perfectly viable storage method as they hold out pretty well in terms of storage and usability, though they do lack some of the modern upsides that we have become accustomed to. The problem that lies with the humble microfiche is that they can’t easily be shared among other people, they can’t be printed as such and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to view them. The latter point is due to the vast majority of people moving away from the microfiche and onto more modern alternatives such as digital file formats with which you can do pretty much whatever you like with the fiche images. This means that the machines have become niche items that are increasingly hard to find, operate, or even rent, never mind the cost of finding parts for older machines, and as such the prices rise considerably and you can face spending up to £15,000 on a microfiche reader for a particularly good one. The alternative is microfiche conversion to digital. I’m sure a lot of the purists are not fans of the idea of this, but the fact is that progress and moving forward is going to catch up with the standard microfiche reader sooner rather than later even more so than it already has. Microfiche readers are, to be frank, obsolete, and have been for quite some time.






