Best scanner for crisp, high magnification..

[walkerbl]

Hi everyone. I have some old artwork that is deteriorating and needs to be scanned. The artwork has incredibly tiny writing on it. One of the requirements is to be able to magnify any portion of the scan by like 4000%, enough to see a single letter very clearly and crisply. This for study and archival purposes.

I've attempted to do this on our HP 4370 at 3600dpi. And while the scan itself seems decent (1.9GB file), it gets fuzzy once you get to high magnification.

I'm just learning about scanning. I'm hoping you guys can give me some pointers.

1. Obviously our little HP 4370 is not going to cut it (though I am going to try SilverFast to see if it makes a difference). What level of scanner do you think I need to achieve this? Is there something that will work in the $1000 - $10,000 range? Or are we talking a Creo or Cruse?

2. Unfortunately, some of the artwork is brittle, and larger than a traditional flatbed. Would a Cruse scanner be able to scan at the resolution I need? I don't understand their possible resolution when they talk about a 450MB 3x8 bit head.

3. Interactive zooming - in order to study the art and be able to easily have dynamic lectures, we want to be able to zoom the image dynamically without excessive load times. Using photoshop or other graphic programs is not feasible for a 2GB image when you're giving a lecture. One solution we found is using Zoomify (which is also part of Photoshop CS3). Seems to work very well (assuming we can get the magnified image clear enough). Does anyone know of a better solution?

Thanks for any help

[Bruce Watson]

Off the top of my head I see two options that might work well for you. First is a Cruse scanner. The other is a Better Light scan back on an LF camera. Either option requires considerable capital outlay. IOW buying a scanner and doing this yourself is probably not feasible unless you are doing lots and lots of scans.

If OTOH you going to hire it out, look for people in your area doing art reproductions. These are people who specialize in digitizing art works. It takes some skills to light art work properly for scanning and/or photographing, and some skills to get a good reproduction into a file. But that sounds like what you need at this point.

[Gordon Moat]

http://www.bgsu.edu/colleges/technology/cat/index.html

These people have been running a Cruse for a while. You could either consider hiring their services, if you can ship your items, or contact them about their experiences.

If your items to scan are somewhat fragile, you might not want to have them on a flatbed scanner. That would mean some overhead copy set-up. You could also do that with a film camera set-up and then have the film scanned.

If you look at resolution tests done by C. Perez et al, then you find a few large format lenses that can resolve fine detail quite well from center to edges of their image circles. Going with about a 40x enlargement, you would still have resolved detail on the film in several of these. The problem then becomes scanning that film to create image files that retain what is on the film, which requires a fairly high end scanning set-up.

Another approach would be medium format film, and not imaging your documents in one shot. Use several shots of sections, with better resolving medium format lenses, then scan that medium format film. You could use a Nikon 9000 scanner, or an Imacon, or get a refurbished Creo iQSmart or refurbished Screen Cezanne.

Last option would be a choice of a few B/W films, Zeiss lenses, and a Nikon film body. You would photograph even more sections of each document to cover the entire work. Then scan individual frames (probably Nikon 9000 scanner) and stitch together the files later. This would be much greater labor until the final result, but you could resolve very fine detail in each capture.

Along with the BetterLight scan back mentioned, you could look into the Anagramm. Neither is inexpensive, but you could consider offering similar services to other departments, or even outside institutions. Any gear you might get, consider trying to sell scanning/imaging services to help offset the cost of setting all this up.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography

[tjvitale]

I'm not sure I follow. You want a 40:1 enlargement, but you were scanning at 3600ppi, where the multiple would be 90 ppi, or approximately screen resolution.

The human eye is roughly capable of 6 lp/mm or 300ppi. This would suggest a 40X resolution of 12000 ppi. This would only be possible if multiple scan are combined. Your specification may be high; 40-times magnification is quite high for resolving type or hand lettering. Have you checked the actual degree of magnification needed using a stereomicroscope?

A lens capable of 40:1 magnification would have a very small viewing area, making lighting difficult and assuring the need for image stitching.

Flatbeds typically yield about half their stated resolution, based on the Nyquist Sampling theorem (applied to imaging); this also applies to the BetterLight scanback. The scanback would be the better option if the materials that are oversized. I'm not a fan of the Cruse scanner for critical work because there can be color banding based head transport faults.

Another option may be to make scans at high magnification through a stereomicroscope and then stitching them together. At first pass this seems to be quite a lot of work.

It may be possible to use live video from a stereomicroscope. This could be live during the lecture or done before hand to a script. The stereomicroscope would do the "magnification" work with the on-screen resolution being quite low. I was just thinking how I might do this if I had to give the lecture.


Tim Vitale
Paper, Photographs &
Electronic Media Conservator
Film Migration (still) to Digital Format
Digital Imaging & Facsimiles
Preservation & Imaging Consulting
Preservation Associates
1500 Park Avenue
Suite 132
Emeryville, CA 94608

510-594-8277
510-594-8799 fax
tjvitale@ix.netcom.com
<http://briefcase.yahoo.com/tvitale@pacbell.net>
[Use of the above URL may require a "Yahoo! ID" to download files.]

Albumen website (2000) <http://albumen.stanford.edu/>
VideoPreservation Website (2007) <http://videopreservation.stanford.edu>

[finecanvasprints]

I own one of the newer Cruse Scanners, (CS295 MS C+) I used to pay for scanning on a older Cruse owned by Thomas Reprographics. It was about eleven years old at the time, and from what I found out was intended for use as a reprographic copy stand, and not for fine art capture. The cruse scanner is a hybrid between a flatbed scanner and a camera. It is not a flatbed scanner nor does it optically function like one. They have made some serious strides since then.

As far as anyone preferring a better light scanning back to a Cruse, it's like trying to compare a Leica to a Kodak brownie. Yes they can both take pictures, what they share in common completely ends there. The Cruse is a complete, mindfully designed capture system, in its own class, and the other is a 4x5 camera with all the problems and limitations that come with traditional photography and optics. An image from a Cruse scan looks as real as the original, and it is easy to produce consistent, exceptionally high quality images that are true 1:1 scale, completely in focus from edge to edge of the image, and evenly lit, every time. I know that sounds hard to believe, but after much research myself, and finally laying out the cash to buy one, I can confidently say it does what they say it does, and like most German gear, they under-commit and over-deliver.

I use my Cruse for all sorts of things. I have scanned old parchment docs using the vaccum easel, the syncron lighting was able to take out all the wrinkles in the document and allow for items such as the name of the platemaker to be read, without any digital enlargement. (Scanned with a 120 mm custom ground Schnider lens, designed for the Cruse@1000ppi)

If anyone wants to see some images, message me privately and I will provide a FTP link.

M.H.O.

http://www.finecanvasprints.com/digitalarchiving.html

[Lenny Eiger]

Hi everyone. I have some old artwork that is deteriorating and needs to be scanned. The artwork has incredibly tiny writing on it. One of the requirements is to be able to magnify any portion of the scan by like 4000%, enough to see a single letter very clearly and crisply. This for study and archival purposes.

I might suggest a 'wide format' scanner. There are a few, the one I have used is Aztek's. I had an old architectural drawing that was scanned that I output it at a fairly large size, about 6-8 feet, if I remember...

Lenny

[jp]

3. I use zoomify for very large panoramas. It works well. You'll obviously need as fast connection (more than a few megabit) to the web server; either host it on the same machine or somewhere on the campus LAN.

[Aahx]

Umm.. this thread is from May of 08 and no return post from the original poster. Just as an FYI. Interesting info on the Cruse though nonthless.