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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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Since this seems like the type of site that will be slashdotted, I cached a copy of the bee wing image. Enjoy!
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.. 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,
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.
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.
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.
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.