What is microfilm?

When most people think of microfilm, they refer to 16 mm or 35 mm film. Roll microfilm is stored on reels or in 3M or Kodak hard plastic cassettes. The standard length for using roll film is 100 ft, which may contain around 2,000 frames (documents reduced in size). A 35 mm film may have around 600 images of large engineering drawings or approximately 800+ frames of newspaper pages. 16 mm film duplex film (a front and back side) or 16mm films containing checks may hold over 15,000 small documents.

The advantages of microfilm are numerous:

• Microfilming documents allows libraries or research institutes to expand access to collections without putting rare, fragile, or valuable items at risk of theft or damage.
• Obviously holding 2,500 document on a small 16mm reel saves storage space.
• Prints from microfilm can be used in legal proceedings.
  

Of course, microfilm scanning will digitize the microfilm to create a document that literally has no space/storage issues, and can be copied with no degradation in quality.