Talk:Microdot

A student asks

What made the microdot so successful? How did they make the words into the dot?

What made it so successful is it's immense usefulness. Armies during wars, and spies at all times, needed a secret way of sending pages of information. Instructions, maps, reports, all sorts of things. This was before electronic or radio communication, but microdots are still useful.

How it's done, is by photography. You photograph something, a page of text, or a photograph. Then you process the film, then project the image onto the microdot, which is a tiny piece of film. The shrinking is done the same way labs make enlargements of photographs, only obviously it's made smaller instead of larger.

BTW there's a method for asking questions on Wikipedia pages, have a quick look at the help. 188.29.164.229 (talk) 19:22, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the price of microdot identification

Current revision (22:34, 4 September 2006) (edit): I made what I believed to be a grammatical change, improving readability: the price of the procedure was quoted as "USD75", which I changed to $75(US Dollars). Can anyone confirm or correct this pricing? A reference is needed, as this seems like a very cheap method to prevent resale of stolen parts, and yet is only applied to expensive makes; the article names BMW, Ford Performance Vehicles, Holden Special Vehicles, Mitsubishi Ralliant, Porsche, Subaru.

Or perhaps this is a situation where, neutrality or no, we may be revealing a cold truth of the auto industry.

--Mr kitehead 22:41, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Unless there's a clear increase in sales due to using microdot identification where's the incentive for manufacturers to use the technique? They've already been paid for the (now stolen) car so as far as they're concerned microdot identification is simply an added cost. Given the strained circumstances of many manufacturers it's entirely possible that they would be reluctant to adopt it. In a way it's similar to the safety scandals of the 1950s and 1960s where manufacturers were extremely slow to adopt a number of fairly inexpensive features that significantly enhanced the safety of passengers and drivers. Lisiate 20:41, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh and here's an ad for a similar product (albeit with fewer (100-200) dots with a retail price of NZ$99.95. - http://www.idmicrodot.co.nz/kits/bvehicle.php.

USD75 is a very large outlay for a high volume vehicle manufacturer. For example a 200,000 volume manufacturer would spend USD15 million applying this. Investigation shows this cost is entirely the cost of the dots, and the machinary to apply them, it does not include the cost for the operators of the machinary, or the knock on effect to a factory production line.

The effects of this product in reducing theft, or improving recovery is so far unproven. Critics of the system point to the fact that specialist equipment is required to read the dots, and this makes roadside reading impossible, thus reducing the effectiveness. - Mr Jones 16 July 2007

ISTM that anything which incurs costs would be shunned by the car industry!

In terms of cost, (at least in the UK) "Alphadot"[1] sells (retail) for about 30.00 GBP (checking in January 2009), so similar to the prices listed above.

To the end user though, this can be recovered in terms of reductions in insurance premiums Nuwewsco (talk) 19:42, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Amount of information which can be stored

Does anyone have any information they can add to this article about the amount of information which can be stored on (say) a 1mm microdot, or the degree to which images can be shrunk down such that they can still be recovered intact?

It's surprising that this hasn't already been added to the article; I would have thought it would be one of the first things anyone would ask about them? Nuwewsco (talk) 19:49, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

From what we have seen in the field, there is upwards of 11 lines per dot (1mm diameter) with a maximum of 18 characters per line. HawkIMdot (talk) 21:35, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

The claim that 1 page could be legibly reproduced in .001 sq mm in 1925 seems at odds with what's written above, as well as this article from 1989, which claims that "commercial emulsions are now available that can resolve 7000 lines per millimeter." If we assume 5 lines of resolution per line of text, 45 lines per page requires 225 lines of resolution, and .001 sq. mm would mean a square .032mm x .032mm, which would mean ~7000 lines of resolution per mm. Are we to believe that the best efforts in 1925 are equivalent to the best commercially available efforts in 1989? --173.48.209.3 (talk) 19:36, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

There was an error in transcribing the data from the source material regarding the original resolution of Goldberg's images. I've fixed it from the text here --173.48.209.3 (talk) 20:47, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

More detail on "Prof. Zapp" to be integrated

The claim that a mythic "Prof. Zapp" invented the microdot is based on a statement by Herbert Hoover. Hoover had seen a German microdot from South America but intercepted by British intelligence and given to the FBI by double-agent Dusko Popov in August 1941. Hoover wrote, "the famous Professor Zapp, inventor of the microdot process, at the technical high school in Dresden." There was no Zapp in Dresden at the time, and people likely substituted Walter Zapp, inventor of the Minox subminiature camera. A microdot camera developer in Leipzig, Kurt Zapp, was assigned by German security agency to adapt Goldberg's techniques, but he was neither a professor or the inventor. (Buckland 2006: 245-246, referring to William White's work including "The Microdot: Then and Now " (1989, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence); "Subminiature Photography" (1990, Focal Press); "The Microdot: History and Application" (1992, Phillips Publications). --Reagle (talk) 17:21, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Glad to have the information here. It has the ring of truth, or of very convincing legend. Thanks. But would that not be J E Hoover? ww (talk) 18:06, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

External links modified

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No photo

Really? How can we not have a pic? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 07:13, 2 April 2017 (UTC)