| Reproduction Manuals - Guaranteed Quality Ratings |
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Overall Quality
means just that... the overall condition/appearance. Specific imperfections,
if any, are provided in the item's description. It is difficult to establish
a grading scale that works for everyone because everybody sees things somewhat
differently. We do our very best to make accurate descriptions. Most customers
find their item meets or exceeds our rating. |
| Overall Quality Ratings Are Individually Assigned
to Each Item |
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Excellent |
Typical responses from buyers are, "Wow! This
is much better than expected." Photo-type illustrations if present,
are clear. Text and line drawings are crisp and clear (or otherwise
identical to the original). As with any type of printing and
as with many original manuals, there may be a few random tiny
specks but essentially are free of anything that doesn't belong. |
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Very Good |
The majority of our customers usually call these
excellent. These are almost exactly the same as those we rate
as Excellent with only some very minor and sometimes difficult
to describe difference. Often it is a subtle imperfection of
some sort or it may nothing more than the fact that the item
in question is unremarkable, even though it may look precisely
like the original. It may be that the original had covers printed
with some amount of color and we decided to not do in color. |
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Good to Very Good |
This should be self-explanatory. |
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Good |
Most people would pick up this item and say,
"This is a nice reproduction." Text is perfectly easy
to read but may not be *crisp* or it might be a little darker
or a little lighter than perfection. There may be some areas
of the original that will not reproduce perfectly. There may
be some spot or mark introduced by the printing equipment. There
may be some small areas with some light smudges, smears, streaks,
specks, or stray marks. It may be that we *had to* lighten or
darken much more than normal on some pages in order to bring
out (or eliminate) some difficult areas. |
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Fair to Good |
This should be self-explanatory. |
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Fair |
The majority of people would look at this item
and say, "This is ok... certainly nothing to brag about but
nothing much to complain loudly about either." Part or all of
it has a typical photocopy appearance with various degrees of
quality. Some areas may be great and others relatively poor.
Text is not hard to read but is not crisp and clear either.
Pages may have various imperfections. There might be some smudges,
smears, streaks, specks, etc. In almost all cases these will
be made from a factory reprint instead of a first printing manual.
Or it may be our "original" is a copy. These are almost always
discounted from normal price schedule. |
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Poor |
This is reserved for the very few items we have
that we offer in spite of it's overall quality. Always made
from a copy or a badly damaged original. We may even have spent
a lot of time attempting to clean it up in order to bring it
up to our poor rating. This item will have some or all the imperfections
you might expect from someone making copies of copies by carelessly
slapping stuff on a copy machine. It will useful in some manner...
otherwise we would not be offering it at all. |
Some service manuals have sections with extraordinarily small print (2-4
point type size) on a few or several pages. Worse yet, some of this tiny
printing was done in a light pastel color in the originals. These conditions
are usually found on a schematic or a printed circuit board layout. In a
few cases some of it is virtually unreadable in the original even with a
magnifying glass. Sometimes it is almost impossible to know what it says
for certain. It makes one wonder what these companies were thinking when
they printed them. We use very good equipment so that if it is readable
in the original, it will almost always be so in our reproductions.
We are working to make sure our descriptions include this information
when appropriate. We will be providing some sample scans and explanations
of various company manuals that are problematic as soon as we can. Note
that some service manuals from most any company (Especially see
Akai Note) may have at least some original
printing in strange colors like light purple, light green, light orange,
light blue, light red or pink. And sometimes these are mixed together in
the same illustration and it may have very thin lines or very small type
size.
As long as our equipment is running nearly 100% perfect, we
can almost always get a respectable (often excellent) reproduction without
introducing any specks, distortions, smudges, etc. Sometimes we can't and
those pages may have some slightly darker areas or may show some shadows
of the printing from the opposite page side. We try *our best* to eliminate
such problems even though sometimes that results in text that is slightly
lighter/darker than would be desired. Or #1 goal in every case, is to make
the information readable.
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