Colecovision Manuals?

[Jorpho]

I was rifiling through the basement today and was surprised to find that all the manuals for the Colecovision games of my youth are present and accounted for. (It's a bit of a pity the boxes are all long gone. I've never seen the crazy Asian-looking box art I remember for Mr. Do anywhere.)

Should I bother scanning these? I do not see any readily available source for Colecovision manual scans online, but maybe I'm not looking in the right place. (ReplacementDocs.com has nothing at all.)

[digitalpress]

Scan them! I'd prefer to replace the text files.

http://www.digitpress.com/manuals/colecovision/index.html

[Jorpho]

Two years I've been meaning to do this, but I finally have access to the technology to make this task vaguely feasible.

I give you what are probably the Internet's first Colecovision manual scans:
http://www.savefile.com/files/2107649

If these look like they were scans of cheap photocopies, well, the originals very much look like cheap photocopies. I guess it was a cost-cutting measure.

The scanner doesn't have an option for lossless compression, so I figured I might be able to make up for it by scanning at 600 DPI. If there's something immediately obvious that I should be doing differently, please let me know - there's a lot more where these came from.

[Steve W]

If these look like they were scans of cheap photocopies, well, the originals very much look like cheap photocopies. I guess it was a cost-cutting measure.
What? Coleco being cheap and cost-reducing manuals down to a Xeroxed manual on a sheet of folded paper? Surely not! :D

Thanks for this. I only started collecting Colecovision stuff a couple of years ago, and it's pretty hard to find any game boxed with instructions around here. I've found plenty of Intellivision games boxed, I might have found two Coleco boxes in total. I appreciate the instructions!

[newtype5]

i just checked them out - good job, and thanks. one suggestion though - 600dpi is a bit of overkill and it increases the file sizes tremendously. 300dpi should be more than adequate for readability/printing. you could even scan at 300dpi, and then convert them to 150dpi to make the file sizes smaller. they should still look great. experiment with saving them at different levels/jpg compressions, and you'll find the right balance of size and appearance. thanks!

[Jorpho]

Yes, I was looking over the guidelines at replacementdocs.com again and apparently 150 dpi and medium compression is quite adequate. I would scan directly to PDF, but each image still has to be cropped after scanning. (Fortunately IrfanView supports lossless JPEG cropping.)

[Jorpho]

Aww, I'm not pioneering anymore. :( Thanks for the heads-up; I'm glad I didn't try to do all of them earlier today.

I suppose it might make a difference that the manuals I have are mostly multilingual versions, but considering how long it takes to scan them (they're freaking books, practically!), I'm sure the existing versions will do fine.

The only other thing I have of interest is some promotional materials; are scans of those desirable? Also, would you be averse to the redistribution of these manuals through Replacementdocs.com ?

(All this time I thought Frantic Freddy was supposed to be something like the C64 Frantic Freddie. Glad that's cleared up.)