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Thread: Probably Sacrilegious

  1. #1

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    Probably Sacrilegious

    Started a new project today... DIY large format scanner camera. Camera is a B&J 5x7 camera and has some kind of 8x10 lens.



    After 1 day's work, made a rail and clamp, lens board, removable "ground" glass, velco scanner mount, and hacked the scanner. Result was this truly glorious image (heh):


    (just a quick preview scan @ f4.5)

    Very much alpha stage... but it kinda works. So on to version 0.2. Not bad for 1 day.

  2. #2

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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    Look around, this has been done before. Perhaps you can steal some useful ideas ...

  3. #3

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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    I've been doing that. There is some very helpful documentation online.

  4. #4
    hacker extraordinaire
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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    What kind of scanner did you use? Did you disable the cold cathode light in the scanning optic? How are you reading the data out; is it still using the scanner's driver or have you hacked it so you can directly control the steppers and the data readout?
    Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
    --A=B by Petkovšek et. al.

  5. #5

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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    Quote Originally Posted by BetterSense View Post
    What kind of scanner did you use? Did you disable the cold cathode light in the scanning optic? How are you reading the data out; is it still using the scanner's driver or have you hacked it so you can directly control the steppers and the data readout?
    I'm using the cheapest scanner I could find at the time (I bought the stuff in 2008 and was lazy for 2 years), a Canoscan LiDE25. It is a real piece of garbage. :-)

    We first removed the light guide (long strip of clear plastic that sits in front of the LED light) and then we removed the pinhole lens array and IR filter (long black strip that sits on top of the sensor array). I think that was all we did to the scanner itself. I'm more the camera guy, and my friend is more the computer guy. I don't think any software was hacked at this point, and we were just using the standard drivers. I've read the Vuescan is a much better program for this kind of project (and I use it for my film scans anyway) so I'll be trying that next to see what happens. We will also be taking a dremel to the scanner to hopefully fix the heaving keyholing.

    The ground glass and scanner both attach to the camera by velcro... we like to keep things high tech. :-)

  6. #6

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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    100% crop @ f16

  7. #7

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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    So it looks like you are getting a lot of digital noise. Perhaps trying Vuescan and telling it to do a long-exposure pass or a multi-scan might give a cleaner scan, that is if that scanner supports either of those features, which is doubtful.

  8. #8

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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    That's good advice.

    I'm pretty sure this scanner supports nothing fancy whatsoever.

  9. #9

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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    Interesting. I bought a Canon Lide 100 about a year ago thinking of doing the same thing. I'll follow this thread closely!

  10. #10

    Join Date
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    Re: Probably Sacrilegious

    Hi Sean, I started my own scanner cam a couple days ago using a Lide35. I followed Make's blog article by Mike Golembewski. Mike suggests you dremel out the black holder to get rid of the vignetting. I did so (or tried) but the issue persisted perhaps even worse than before.

    I wanted to ask you which OS/App you are using with yours. I tried my desktop G4 but a more portable setup would be easier. I've got a netbook in which I am trying to install Ubuntu since the SANE application is not supported by Windows.

    Here's my first try without modification and second with black tape over the led and dremeled holder. (not what I expected)

    Is there a more dedicated forum for this project btw?

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