When I first did the album images for what was to become Only Olivia in 1992, scanners were prohibitively expensive. I had to photograph the albums on film, and then drag a Logitech ScanMan Color hand scanner over the 6"x4" prints.
Not only did I lose image quality in the photographic printing process, but a hand scanner isn't easy to use without skewing the scan. It worked OK for the time.
The process now
In the intervening 25+ years, digital cameras and flatbed scanners appeared. It's tough to scan a 12 inch album cover on an 8½ by 11¾ inch A4 scanner and stitch the results and descreen the printing screen. So I photographed the albums using a macro lens and a Canon EOS450D in raw format, letting the optical filtering of the camera fuse the halftone screen in a similar way to the eye. It works fine on colour printing most of the time, there are some residual artefacts in b/w halftone screens but it's not too bad IMO. Phase One Capture One pro was used to align and process the Raw files, and I use angled softbox flash from both sides exposing the frame in the dark to minimise flare and reflections.
To preserve colorimetry and signal quality I used a peak white and velvet black control patch and let Capture One do it's job, I have matched these before cropping, so the colours should be reasonably accurate, subject to fading, which usually hits magenta harder.
Commercial printing has a halftone screen of typically ~133 lpi, so as an approximation for a 12 in record this would give an image size of ~1600 by 1600 pixels, for a CD about 700 x 700.
For output I have targeted a 4k screen vertical resolution of 2160, a bit less than my camera resolution, a bit more than the theoretical resolution of the printing process. It's not perfect, and A3 scanner and descreening would be the ideal, but it's pretty good. Looking at these on my TV there are some halftone artefacts on the Back To Basics tan shirt, and the deep red of the Soul Kiss inner spread. I can see the occasional registration errors in the original printing at 1x zoom, so it's not too far off capturing the original quality.
Comparing album and CD
I took a copy of MCA's Greatest Hits CD, and the transfer off my 1978 UK copy of Greatest Hits and matched brightness, and set them side by side. It appears that the MCA CD is slightly zoomed in, I matched the scanned medium size to 2160 height. But while it creates a slightly disturbing asymmetry, you may be able to see a difference in image quality.
On a big screen like a 4k TV, that matters. My computer screen is only HD, but even on that there's a difference. If you are looking at this on a mobile phone, well, there's probably little in it, unless you are in your twenties with acute sight. The screen may have the nominal resolution, but it's not big enough.
