I am collecting Leica and Voigtlander cameras. (I also used to collect Rollei and Zeiss cameras, but ran out of space). I have acquired - at great cost - a large collection of rare old catalogues and manuals from these companies.

To justify the expenses, I decided to make these catalogues and manuals available to other collectors. I have spent countless hours to scan the catalogues. Some were in poor condition and required extensive digital rework to make them look pretty again. I have then organized the scanned pages into .pdf files to make them easily computer-readable.

To avoid any misunderstanding, all files are based on me scanning my own original catalogues. I don't use pirated copies of other people's work.

I fully understand that it is desirable to own the original, but the scanned copies give the collector an inexpensive preview of the information in the catalogue.

Here is some technical information for those who are interested:

1. Most of the time, the staples need to be removed to get a good scan.
2. A Hewlett-Packard scanjet 3970 is used to scan the pages.
3. The typical resolution is 300 dots per inch.
4. Standard jpeg compression is used.
5. Digital clean-up (rotating the image to make the lines horizontal, removing dust and smudges, etc.) is done with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and LViewPro.
6. Moiré effects in scanning point rastered images are due to the interference between the regular scanner raster and the regular (but different) point raster of the image. To avoid Moiré effects, the images are exported, smoothed, and re-imported into the page. There is no loss of information or image quality.
7. Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional is used to combine the jpeg’s into one file.
8. Whenever appropriate, a Table of Content is added at the beginning of the document and linked to the individual chapters using Adobe Acrobat’s link function. This facilitates navigating large files.