Friday, December 14, 2007

Comparison of HQO and Footnote Pages

In my last post, I compared the content of the Revolutionary War Pension File of Philip Row of Tewksbury NJ on HeritageQuestOnline (12 selected pages only) and on Footnote (48 pages, the entire file).

In this post, I want to show a comparison of the same page on both web sites. The first document is page 3 from the HQO file - the first page of Mary Row's affidavit. It is a .GIF file (147 kb) and the writing is extremely clear. The background has not been "adjusted" to take out "noise" or "dots" (hmmm, probably not the proper technical term!) on the page.


The image from Footnote below is page 4 from Philip Row's pension file. It is a .jpg file (536 kb). The image is "softer" - there are no obvious "dots" in the background, and the writing is not as easy to read.


All of the pages on Footnote are similar - they appear to have been visually adjusted to take out the background "noise" through some process. However, large blotches on pages have not been adjusted or removed, based on a comparison of other pages in this Pension File.

2 comments:

Becky Wiseman said...

Randy - Actually I think you have it backwards. From what I've seen and my experience with scanning documents, I think the HQO image is the one that has been manipulated so that it has a higher contrast. The Footnote image is probably closer to what the original document looked like.

Craig Manson said...

Thanks, Randy. A very useful couple of posts!