British Newspaper Archive PAYG Option

[ikas]

To be fair they do provide a snippet, if you decide to go ahead and 'view' the full image then its available on your screen and you will get all the info - which is what they are selling.
Boo

By snippet do you mean a thumbnail view of all the pages? If so, it is not possible to read the page to see if it has the relevant information. My problem is I thought the free trial would allow me to assess this prepaid option and I wasn't really paying enough attention. Suddenly I had nothing left in my free trial.

[ikas]

Rant over
Zaph

I recognised myself in your rant. 

[Tickettyboo]

To be fair they do provide a snippet, if you decide to go ahead and 'view' the full image then its available on your screen and you will get all the info - which is what they are selling.
Boo

By snippet do you mean a thumbnail view of all the pages? If so, it is not possible to read the page to see if it has the relevant information. My problem is I thought the free trial would allow me to assess this prepaid option and I wasn't really paying enough attention. Suddenly I had nothing left in my free trial.

Not as such, I know that isn't readable but the OCR attempt which is printed at the side of that will often give an idea.
e.g. I just used the BNA to search for an article I already have from 24 July 1874 for an inquest report in the Newcastle Courant. I put Grace Agnes Sinclair in the search and this popped up.
Its not always that clear, the OCR struggles if the scan isn't too clear and you need to learn to interpret the gobbledegook 

Boo

[Chris Doran]

It's going to be down to what you understand by the word download. When you zoom in on a page it's downloaded to your computer. I suspect that's what BNA means.

I was drawn to the same conclusion during FindMyPast's free newspapers week recently. They now have a fair use limit of 200 "records" per day. "Record" = page, it seems. As the articles I was looking for were rarely found by the Search, I had to browse page by page, which used up my quota rapidly, mitigated only by a shortcut of knowing which page they were usually on.

[ikas]

Now RC is back up I can answer my own question. I got my wife to register with them and this time I paid careful attention to what used up her 3 page free trial. As suggested by others on this thread zooming-in on a page is considered to be a download. As the small thumbnail is far too small to see it is impossible to judge whether to zoom-in or not. The OCR translation only happens after you zoom-in and highlight an article. So the PAYG forty page option is unusable for my project. I will consider which subscription model to use. Thanks to all for contributing.