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Microscopy With A Film Scanner
NickFitz writes "If you've got a film scanner lying around, this site shows you how to use it as a microscope. "Your monitor displays images at about 70-90 dpi, so taking the example of my Mac monitor at about 75 dpi, we get a magnification of 4000/75 which is about x53. It's not a lot and isn't going to show the likes of blood cells, but it should give an interesting view of small transparent objects." Did you know that bees wings are hairy?"
53x? I have an Intel QX3 USB microscope which goes to 200x. In the name of science (yeah right), I used it to look at a Biore strip fresh from my nose. I didn't clean my nose for a while in preparation for this advancement of knowledge and the results are worth it.
Trolling is a art,
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I hate it when she leaves it to me to wash the scanner glass though!
sPh
Want photographs? You can get surprisingly good results by simply holding a digital camera flush to the eyepiece. I have a few of these I did for fun here.
Have fun.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
People have been using scanners in this way for image forensics for years. We also used this method to get around image mosaicing large microscopy fields several years ago in an undergraduate biology class I took. (amazing what students come up with to avoid work) Now of course image mosaicing software is available to get around this problem, but it's good to see science stuff like this get out to the main stream. Perhaps this will also make it into a few junior high and high school classes as a cool exercise.
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Thanks a bunch. I now have a vaguely disturbing mental image of a naked bee.
This could be really good for schools. Find and old film scanner, or get one from a business. Then hook it up to a computer monitor.
It's dirt cheap, provided you know the right people. And an entire class can all look at once.
If schools would jump on stuff like this, there wouldn't be such a budget crisis and lack of money for everything else they want to do.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
does this mean I can now see Darl McBride's heart without an expensive microscope! Wheeee!
Since this seems like the type of site that will be slashdotted, I cached a copy of the bee wing image. Enjoy!
Why do I h8 apple?
.. has also been done, albeit with a lesser degree of success. I believe it appears in the Annals of Improbably Research collected book.
The wings are not the hairiest thing on a bee.
True, but have you ever tried to spread those little legs?
Trolling is a art,
now thats what i call geekyness. Squashing flies and looking them before putting them in my mouth.
Which of course leads to the oft-asked question, did you ever smell moth balls?
(Hint for the moderators: it's not the nose that's the most disgusting body part...)
It's only a matter of time before someone sits on the scanner with their pants down.
"Honey, does this make my ass look big?"
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Yeah. Funny thing is, those female bees have a little prick! Unless they're a queen, in which case they don't have a prick. Go figure! Wow, the insect world is crazy sometimes!
--
And now for the obligatory Monty Python quote...
"Half a bee, philsophically, must ipso facto half not-be. But can a bee be said to be or not to be an entire bee, when half the bee is not a bee, due to some ancient injury?"
So, sure it's all big and clever to use a scanner as a microscope, but is it really that big and clever to pull the wing off a bee?
I'm shocked! This sort of behaviour should not be promoted on Slashdot!!!!
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
I love Science!
Digital Dragonflies has been around for many years and is the best example of scanning large insects I have ever seen.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
but it's been a long time since anyone asked me....Thanks for visiting the 9th Grade Biology Trivia (tm) store....
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
For years I've used a scanner as a cheap way to
document mods to PCB's (printed circuit boards, not
Polychlorinated Biphenyls). Even the tiny labels
that sometimes appear on 0603 resistors are
readable, and it documents what's there, rather
than what I _think_ is there.
However: some scanners have better depth of field
than others. The ones which sweep a mirror under
the document, rather than sweeping the sensors
themselves, seem to have better depth of field.
Anybody ever attempt to hack their scanner into a camera? By disabling/removing the light source, placing a bit of frosted glass in the object plane and a lens in front, I would bet that one could make a linear-array camera. Image quality might suck, but it would be quite cool, nonetheless.
I see old flatbed scanners at garage sales. As soon as I find one for $5, I might try to make a large format linear camera from the thing. I already have some lenses (from old dismantled photocopiers) that will be perfect for projecting an image onto a 8.5 x 11 "film" plane of the scanner.
Any other scanner/camera hackers out there???
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Now, because of the slashdot effect, there's going to be a bunch of poor, pathetic little bees trying to fly with only one wing.
I hope you're happy.
Did you know that bees wings are hairy?
So are female German shot putters. And let me tell you I didn't have to wrestle one on to my scanner to find that out.
Cynicism is the natural defence of the romantic.
Does anyone know where to buy the tiny flourescent bulbs used in those film scanners? Mine has burned out.
Share bicycle touring info worldwide: http://wheretocycle.com
I heard somewhere that you can also use a slide projector for this. Not very nerdy but better magnification: put the sample you want to enlarge between two layers of transparent plastic in a slide frame and project on the wall/screen/whatever. Be aware that the lamp of the slide projector gets quite hot so the sample as well as the plastic have to be heat resistant.
-- Cheers!
Did you know that it's probably the surface of the flatbed that's "hairy"?
blog |
Is public school so bad now that grown people are amazed to look through a 53x "microscope"?
I recently discovered that you can create a good telescope with some standard camera lens and a webcam. Just take of its lens (was easy with mine) and place it behind the lens at the proper distance and you get some magnification. It gives you some extra magnification compared to a 35 mm film because the sensor is much smaller. With a 500 mm lens, the moon was too big to fit on the computer screen! I also tried to photograph some ants in the back garden from the kitchen table, but the little animals didn't want to stand quiet.
In a 2001(?) issue of National Geographic there was a fantastic article on moths photographed with a hacked dia scanner. If I recall correctly it mentioned a resolution of up to a million dpi. Pictures of up to 1 meter in length were put on a wall and made into an exposition. Great stuff.
We do a large amount of anatomy and use a Nikon film scanner with a microscope slide adaptor. It works at 4000 dpi (equivalent to about a 10x objective in resolution) and has greatly improved out throughput as it can do 3 full slides in about 2 minutes. For low resolution images(and archiving) this is the way to go.
Image quality might suck because most scanners have lighting systems that are appreciably brighter than the image projected by a lens. So the image might be dark. Moreover, the coupling of the imaging lens' projected image into the scanner optics would be imperfect and so the center of the image would probably be far brighter than the edges. Finally, the hacked scanner-camera would only work on motionless objects -- any movement during the long scanning time would create interesting artifacts.
But it would be quite cool because you would have an umpteen megapixel camera. A 300 dpi flatbed would create an 8.4 megapixel image and a 600 dpi flatbed would provide a 33.6 megapixel image. A 4000 dpi slide scanner would lead to about a 21 megapixel camera.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Finally! A use for the film scanner in the lab where I work. We have one in the room with the microscopes, and I've never been able to think of a use for it.
--joedoe
If I see a wingless bee I'll know who to blame.
Did you know that 12-year-old Brianna LaHara was going to scan bees wings on her film scanner for her science project, but she had to sell it to cover her RIAA tab.
... Don't forget to stop by Noodle Kidoodle to get all the nation's nine year olds to sign your amnesty agreements.
Way to go RIAA
I was thinking I'm weird.
Not anymore.
Thanks.
You'll need something a bit more powerful.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
1. place item flat on glass
2. cover with opaque backing (white, black, grey, or even a picture if you want a fast background
3. test scan, and crop and color correct and muck about with image size using the scanner's preview software
4. scan to a TIF and finish photoediting (with the GIMP, of course)
If you have the cover at a slight slant, and with just enough clearance that you are not touching tiny items, you can get dropshadows behind them with no photoediting needed.
So I was at this red light in a van with a bunch of friends. There was a yuppie-looking cool dude in front of us, on a motorcycle. He had a booth tan and spiky hair, and a booth-tanned halter-topped girlfriend sitting on the back.
Hey, that's ok. That's great for him, in fact! Motorcycles are good, they're fun! But his license plate said:
"IAMFLY"
as in "I'm fly, baby", "I'm phat", "look at me, I am the stuff".
On a motorcycle license plate??? I mean, you're so incredibly at the mercy of other motorists when you're on a motorcycle, you'd think he'd try to be a little less cocky, maybe with a license plate like "HITHERE" or "NICECAR" or "PLZ!RUNOVERME".
So I rolled down the window, leaned out, and screamed at the top of my voice -- from a Ford Windstar minivan, at a crowded intersection, wearing a suit -- "I AM WINDSHIELD!!!!"
He looked back, all confused -- and then the light turned green, and his girlfriend poked him, and he turned around and sped off.
Anyways, the scanner glass and your story made me think of bugs and windshields and stuff.
Allow me to recommend an article from Annals of Improbable Research, most easily available in one of their "Best Of" collections:
This wonderful article describes how to image down to the level of single atoms or even subatomic particles, using nothing more than an ordinary photocopier!Too bad the film-scanner folks missed this: could have saved themselves a lot of work.
I didn't know bees wings are hairy. I might have known bees' wings are, though. </nazi type=apostrophe>
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Here's a cheaper way to get similar results. 1) Take a bee wing 2) Put it really close to your eye
I have a binocular dissection scope that has two settings, 10x and 30x. It's not for examining invisibly small objects, but it's fascinating to look at tiny objects with. You get a full 3-D image that enlarges a penny to the size of a dinner plate. I highly recommend it.
It came with some 1.5x objectives that give it magnifications of 15x and 45x, but I haven't even put those in yet.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Are you looking for an inexpensive microscope with sub micron resolution? All you need is a CCD chip, a laser, and a pinhole. Digital Inline Holography does the trick. For more info check:
http://www.pawlitzek.com/hardcopy.htm
As usual, a tip of the hat to Monty Python's Flying Circus
We are the 198 proof..
Flatbed scanners used for video video conferencing? Twain support for video confrencing is not only practical, but solves that pesky privacy issue. When you want to actually participate in a video conference, all you need do is press your face to the glass and talk. When you need to leave the conference for a moment, people can't see what you are doing. Users who accidently leave their cameras on will only reveal what their ceiling looks like, or what the top of their scanner lid looks like.
The Philly firedepartment has said that this a valued tool to reduce the number of false alarms. User at alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.genitals-on-scanner says that they've been using this technology for years and it's not just an office prank.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I am having a problem reading this article could someone magnify it for me? That is it? no thanks I will shop around.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
I couldn't look away. Tres bien. Bravo.
Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
eminem.
Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
ROTFLMAO. Bon Mot, tres bien.
Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
SEVEN YEARS AGO
Fu-cker!
Some people actually read slashdot at work that has filters and an acceptable use policy.
This is slashdot not something awful link of the day. Even the something awful has warnings for crap like this!