Thermal receipts are a time bomb, and most of them have already gone off
Thermal paper does not fade gracefully - it holds up, then it goes, from readable to blank in a couple of years. Here is what still survives on a "blank" receipt, and how faded thermal recovery gets it back.
The Docovly team
Document restoration
2-3 years - From printed to blank, faster than ink ever fades
Halftone dots are not noise, and treating them as noise destroys the picture
Scan a 1950s newspaper photograph and "clean" it, and it gets worse - moire, mush, grey. Here is why the dots are the encoding, not the noise, and what descreening actually does.
The Docovly team
Imaging & technique
measure, then remove · Descreening at the screen's own frequency
What a conservator taught us about condition surveys
We started document restoration with a prompt box: describe the damage, get a result. A paper conservator explained, politely, why that was the wrong interface - and the product changed shape around it.
The Docovly team
Product
Structured condition, not a paragraph
How to photograph a document with a phone (properly)
Most document restoration failures are capture failures. Six minutes of phone-camera technique beats any amount of later processing - here is exactly how to photograph a document so it can actually be restored.
The Docovly team
Guides
6 min
of capture technique beats any amount of processing
The withheld column, and why a blank is not a blank
The most useful column in our document-capture export is one that mostly contains nothing. Here is why separating "blank" from "could not read" from "failed a check" is what lets a registry load the data directly.
The Docovly team
Product
“A blank should mean the document was blank.”
Anything else deserves its own column
Recent highlights
Thermal receipts are a time bomb, and most of them have already gone off
ReadHalftone dots are not noise, and treating them as noise destroys the picture
ReadWhat a conservator taught us about condition surveys
ReadHow to photograph a document with a phone (properly)
ReadThe withheld column, and why a blank is not a blank
ReadReading about it is not the same as trying it
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