Japanese camera buff builds 130-megapixel scanner camera for next to nothing

bouncingredball.com

39 points·markup··13 comments

This and the linked page don't show how, only that he did it. They should have went into more detail.

He mounted the lens so that its focal plane was on the scanner element, and sealed the thing to keep light out. That's pretty much it. It's a clever hack, notwithstanding the 4-5 second "exposure" time.

This kind of setup would actually be useful in practice for things like rare book scanning, where you can't flatten the pages for fear of damaging the object.

Google's method of scanning books without flattening them: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227026.000-google-se...

Some other scanning camera attempts:

http://golembewski.awardspace.com/cameras/current/index.html

http://home.comcast.net/~scancams/

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html

A little more info, in English:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/spyuge/20090511/1242053498

But how does that accomplish a 130 MP? What's special about a scanner vs a camera that lets it do that?

Size. Scanner is 8"x10" or so. The actual DPI of the scanner is lower than a traditional camera CCD, but there is so much more space. Your exposure time is how long it takes the scanner to traverse a "page".

Focusing seems painful.

We need a name for this thing. Something like scancam or scamera.

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Scanmera

Large format camera scanning backs have been around for quite a while, which is what this is. Big difference is that there is far less noise in the commercial versions.

This guy called his a scancam:

http://home.comcast.net/~scancams/

both their domains are for sale too.

For his next trick he's building a 160GB SD card...

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