Probably Sacrilegious

[Sean Galbraith]

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

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5166/5341020243_94565f91cc_z.jpg

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):

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5041/5341222199_02cefb0fc1_o.jpg
(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.

[Dan Fromm]

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

[Sean Galbraith]

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

[BetterSense]

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?

[Sean Galbraith]

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. :-)

[Sean Galbraith]

100% crop @ f16
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5043/5341222669_24a6e25efc_b.jpg

[domaz]

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.

[Sean Galbraith]

That's good advice.

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

[jon.oman]

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

[Ramiro Elena]

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?

[Sean Galbraith]

What aperture is your lens?

I don't know of a specific scanner camera forum, though there is a flickr group.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/scannercamera

This scanner camera performs the same on a Windows 7 machine using the Canon scanning software and on an OSX Snow Leopard machine running VueScan

[Ramiro Elena]

I've tried with a 325mm ƒ3,6 Vegionar and a B&L Tessar at ƒ4,5 ƒ11 and ƒ16 with same results.
I am not sure but I think once you modify the array you need to modify the driver as well so it doesn't keep trying to calibrate. (that's what I did). I might go in again and take the tape out.