I was eager to check out the teknetelectronics site Jeans wrote about:
in hopes I could find a few of the really rare manuals I still haven't
been able to locate for my collection. But the site is a bit of a
disappointment. The quantity is there but the quality is lacking.
When you sign up for the free 30 day trial you can download 5 manuals.
But unfortunately you get what you pay for. They are free. But if the
three Tek manuals I chose to download are any indication of the overall
quality of the site I would not be willing to pay for a subscription.
My understanding is that 'membership' is free. They never collected any fees
from me, did not even try to. Keep in mind that company is in rental
business and purpose of this site is to substitute missing operating
manuals. No rental customer repairs or calibrates equipment and I was
surprised to find any service manuals. I guess, those are the ones that
leaked through the system.
The manuals I downloaded were incomplete and disorganized as if whoever
scanned them was not paying attention to what they were doing.
I would say, there is no 'as if', guy who ran paper through the scanner did
not care what came out as long as it was any kind of image. Since I am into
guessing business, I would say that scanning was done by a service company
and when customer asked why pages are not aligned they told him that can be
done, too, but price is triple.
As for incomplete manuals, I would guess that parts were omitted to save the
cost. As I already said, those manuals are intended for rental customers to
use as operating instructions. Few manuals that have schematics,
surprisingly one for 7S14 does, are possibly early scans, before accountants
got billing for scans or ones that leaked through the system.
Personally I prefer paper. Its much easier to grasp the big picture
with a paper manual and as far as I know no one has yet to come up with
a good way to scan the foldout pages.
I would be very hard pressed to argue differently, even when talking about
good scans, like ones available on e bay, but for something that I would
just glance at, like things that I do not own but am curious about circuit,
scans would have to do. Any kind of a small paper manual (e.g. for plug-in)
is upward from $10, frequently $20 and that makes it an expensive
proposition.
As for good way to scan fold out sheets, there is a claim by one e bay
vendor that he has a scan of the whole page and if printed at the place that
can handle B size paper, fold out sheets are usable. Have not seen any of
those schematics, just saw vendor's claim.
Regards
Miroslav Pokorni
