
The Design of an Inexpensive Very High Resolution Scan Camera System (2004) [pdf] - brudgers
https://imaging-vcc.kaust.edu.sa/Documents/W.%20Heidrich/2004/The%20Design%20of%20an%20Inexpensive%20Very%20High%20Resolution%20Scan%20Camera%20System.pdf
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microcolonel
I have a Canoscan LiDE 220 sitting right next to me, I could probably double
the resolution in this. This would be stellar for high-resolution texture
capture. Maybe also very cool for capturing complex details of paintings, like
diffuse, specular, normal, and subsurface diffusion maps.

I wonder if they take into account that the LiDE pixels are non-square. This
is exposed in the SANE driver on Linux (though I'm sure it's by accident), but
the windows drivers don't really let on.

The one problem which they don't seem to mention specifically in the paper is
that Canon still puts USB 2.0 on these devices, so the drivers have to be
careful not to scan the image all at once, or the buffer will fill up. It
indeed takes about two minutes to capture an A4 page in 1200DPI 16 bit mode.

The software they wrote is also very impressive for the time. Today, even if I
want to use ImageMagick just to change the bit depth of a 2400DPI grayscale
scan, it takes up about 9 GiB at cruise, and spikes to nearly 20GiB of RAM.
Thankfully I have much more than that, but they evidently did not.

The system on the LiDE 220 is (close to) 2400x4800DPI, with the 4800DPI being
on the movable axis (even though their marketing material says 4800x4800). If
I removed the colour filter and swapped the lightbar for just white, then the
sensor could do (2400 * 3)x4800 at 16 bits (though their ADC is not quite that
good at the full speed, so more like 12-14 bits). Very cool imaging devices, I
only wish Canon was more open to third parties making interesting use of their
hardware.

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Groxx
> _In this paper, we present a scan camera system in which we transform a
> $100–$200 consumer-grade flatbed scanner into a very high resolution digital
> scan backend. When used in combination with a conventional 8 " x 10" large
> format view camera, this setup achieves resolutions of up to 122-490 million
> pixels (depending on scanner model). The total system, including large
> format camera, lens, scanner, and color filters can readily be assembled for
> about $1200- $1300._

Impressive results for the price.

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killjoywashere
If you think this is interesting, check out whole slide imaging systems, like
Leica's Aperio scanners. 1"x1" scan area yielding 10,000,000,000 pixels.

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dddw
interesting

