Scanner Camera
April 19, 2008 11:25 pmI’ve finally gotten the first version of the scanner camera working. I’ve married an 8×10 cambo monorail camera with a Canon Canoscan scanner. The results are truly remarkable.
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I got the idea from here.
I’ve got a cambo 8×10 monorail and I’m using an unknown Schneider lens. It has an f stop range of 5.6-11, though its physically stopped from going beyond f8. I have a feeling this is either a reproduction lens or a lens from some sort of aerial photography. At any rate, its very wide and covers more than 8×10.
The scanner I chose was from the Canon Canoscan family. The scanner is small, contains a full length sensor (no mirror box) and is powered from USB, making it rather portable. After hacking the scanner apart, I removed the pinhole lens array (the Schneider lens will do just fine) and widened the slot where the sensor array is exposed. I also removed the plastic light bar. I did not remove the LEDs
I’m using linux and have modified the sane plustek backend for the scanner driver. The bulk of modifications made to the driver were to make sure the lamp (led lights inside the scanner) remained off. I’ll probably make more modifications as I read the datasheet for the sensor.
In the meantime, feel free to check out the scanner camera gallery I’m starting:
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Categories: Scanner Camera
3 Responses to “Scanner Camera”
Love the idea, I remember wanting to do this with a Polaroid camera and a 256 color hand scanner about a decade ago. Now that I know the Linux drivers can be hacked a bit I might go shopping for some used scanners. I wonder if the entire back end could be adapted to a microcontroller to make the camera more portable.
Thanks! I’ve had the same idea. Something as simple as a portable HDD capable of running linux would work, I used to have an old one that would read CF/SD cards might be hackable. If you are going to do it, I’d suggest getting one of those canon scanners - dead easy to hack apart. you could probably setup a pinhole camera if you done have a LF one to use. Once I get the code in a reasonable state, I’ll post it online as well.
Hi,
I have also got the Canon Scanner which uses plustek backend, and I am trying to make my own scanner camera.
If you could share the source of modified sane-plustek backend, it would be great, thanks in advance.
Care to comment?