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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 hate it when she leaves it to me to wash the scanner glass though!
sPh
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.
Speaking of scanners and science. Remember this guy (as mentioned here)? We actually did something similar. 2400 dpi is enough for 78 rpm records, and you can get sound from vinyl. Of course, it's noisy, but you can still hear what the song is like.
Scanners have real world applications! :-)
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
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.
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.
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.
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.