If you have a decent phone, I’d simply use its camera and a PDF scanning software. On my iPhone, I use the free Adobe Scan to create OCR:d (searchable) scans of newpapers. The quality is surprisingly good.

Only problem is with winkles/creases — if you’re serious about this, I guess you could try to put a glass or plexiglass ”window” on top of the newspaper to keep it flat?

A very fine build! 👌 To be quite honest, maybe a little over-spec:ed for this fairly light use-case/purpose (price, power usage). But that does mean that you’ll have plenty of room for growth; virtualization etc

If you’re talking about more long-term storage (that is, you want to be sure, in 5-10-20 years time, that you will easily be able to open and view these files), then I would strongly recommend you chose one of these formats that are widely use for archiving purposes:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XjEjFBCGF3N1spNZc1y0DG8_Uyw18uG2j8V2bsQdYjk/edit#gid=893099148

You’re going to simplify your life and your setup if you can avoid transcoding.

In a home environment, I see no need for transcoding anything (direct play of even 90 GB UHD HDR films is no problem to for example iPad, or iPhones or most modern TVs.

Make sure that subtitles are in .SRT format, and you’ll never need transcoding for that either.

The ONLY time I see a potential need for transcoding would be if all you media is stored in maximum-quality 80GB rips, and you need to watch a movie on your phone while on the subway. If you use Plex, the easiest solution is to always download or rip you movies in two formats. One 80 GB maximum quality UHD 10 bit file, and one 720p 1 GB x265 file, that will be automatically selected if bandwidth is low. Violá, you’ll never need transcoding! :-)