Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

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Sunday, December 18, 2011

A painted lady from the distant past.

If you somehow missed the fact that I didn't post a single thing yesterday - I didn't post a single thing yesterday. Friday and Saturday were busy days away from baseball cards. I spent most of the past two days hunting for certain things needed before I go to Japan, going from store to store to find them. I now have some gloves to stay warm in the Tokyo winter air, a wallet sized properly for Japanese yen, some nice gifts for people in Japan, and a sheet-fed photo scanner.

Let's talk about this scanner. For $60 (on sale from $80), I can now insert most cards in one end, and they zip through in a few seconds, coming out the other side without much effort. The images are instantly cropped and ready for upload. So I can easily run through hundreds of cards in an hour - no worrying about crashing software on my HP, sitting hunched over in an awkward position and trying to get those curly Chrome cards to sit straight. I'm going to give it a run for the money when I get to Georgia. Did I tell you I'm going to Georgia? I'll be there for about 5 days (25th to the 31st) to see my mom and a friend, and do what I can with my storage unit.

Hopefully it's built well enough that it can get me through all the cards I want to scan out there, and keep on ticking as a permanent solution. What won't it do? Most jersey cards and other thick cards. Plus, cards with black borders get cropped to the first non-black part of the card. I can figure out a solution for that at some point if I so desire, and a regular scanner will handle the thick cards. It crops just a little bit off the edges, but since I'm not scanning for sale, I can deal with that.
 Notice the off-center cropping. Then again, maybe the card was slightly off-center to begin with.
Now this card was certainly not that miscut. But I can deal!
Meanwhile, I have my painted lady. She's from a set known as Kinney Novelties (N228-3), where each card has a unique die-cut design. I can't tell for sure, but each of the 75 designs might have different ladies (though I can't confirm this). There is a baseball design (a portrait of a lady on a round baseball) in the set. Eventually I might tackle the entire set, but for now I'm happy with this great example.

3 comments:

  1. I'm a sucker for non-sport issues... cool painted lady. And congratulations on the new scanner. I need to invest in a better scanner myself.

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  2. My scanner sucks. I've seen the Kinney novelties and probably even bid on a few but never won any.

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  3. Fuji: thanks!

    Hackenbush: I think this is the only one I've seen in person. They are totally awesome - the kind of non-sport oddballs Topps needs to put in Ginter.

    I got the scanner at Brookstone, so I'm wary of the overall quality. I've scanned a couple hundred cards so far, though, and I think it's okay. I'll probably update everyone around New Years as to its merits. But this is sheet-fed, so I can't scan those thick cards or coins. It's cheaper to get a printer with a scanner these days instead of just a regular scanner.

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