Took the scanner camera down to Pikes market during one of their festivals. This was the first time I had the camera outside, and the results were encouraging. You can see all the pics here:

A couple things to note:

I turn off course, fine, light and dark calibration. I use the alt calibration option. I think the per-pixel calibration that is stored in DRAM during the alt calibration is a bit off for the pixles near the top of the image. for example, see this image:

You can see the light band of pixels at the top of the image. This gets significantly better when stiwching from grayscale to color images. The color images come out very very grey. There are two things that I want to look into further:

• Better understanding/knowledge of the calibration. I think this will significantly improve image quality.
• Ensure that I’m operating the scanner ship in 14 bit mode, and that I’m getting out all 14 bits. If the chip is in 14 bit mode then there is no calibration data stored in DRAM (the space is used for pixel data.

Matt

Categories: Scanner Camera
6 Comments »

I’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:

13574

Categories: Scanner Camera
3 Comments »