Flat-Bed Scanner as digi-back for 8x10 view camera?

[drew bedo]

Has any one out there ever adapted a flat-bed scanner to an 8x10 view camera as a scanning back?

[andrew_gale]

Ive heard of it, but the problems are:<br>

 

1. you need power and a computer<br>

2. the exposures will be very long<br>

3. if anything moves withing the frame, it could be captured twice<br>

4. you would have to focus the image precisely to the plane of the scanner, the DOF on these things is incredibly

limited, hence the need to hold paper flat. <br>

5. you would have to find a <i>removable</i> method that would be secure enough to hold the scanner very still

for a while, since you have to remove to focus etc. <br>

6. You would need to eliminate the vibrations that the scanner produces with its motor, or else find a very

secure tripod that wouldn't allow the camera to vibrate. <br>

 

I dont want to discourage you or anything, but after all of that, i bet the quality will be poor.

 

If you do go ahead and do it i think the pn community would love to see such an achievement, so post your results.

[rnt]

See this thread from a week or so ago...

 

http://www.photo.net/large-format-photography-forum/00QZLi

[peter_mounier]

Here's an interesting story...

 

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

 

Peter

[lightrasp1664881197]

I did this 3 years ago using a ten dollar used scanner from GoodWill, my laptop and 8X10 deardorff - it was AWESOME and it was a royal pain in the A** If you have way too much time on your hands and are pretty handy in a wood shop it's rewarding though - good luck to you

 

j~

[kelly_flanigan1]

Some of the early 1990' thru mid 1990's Color copiers had a scanning adapter that projected a 35mm or 120 MF slide on to the scan glass that was 11x17 inches; one got a digital file of the slide on the Fiery Box; then one wrote the digital file on say a zip drive for the customer. The optical paths on these units was long; the light more perpendicular than a flatbeds scan bar. Some folks tried rigging up a smaller vertical process camera above these rigs; to suck in an image of say a painting. One had to fake off the canned scanning adapter and use gobs of light and a fast enlarging lens to get an image. This was a hot topic back in Reno and Vancover at trade shows for the repro industry in the mid/early 1990's. Here I fiddled with an Epson 1200U unit with a transparency adapter about 1 decade ago; one plug the adapter in to fake off the unit; also one adds a key/feature slot so the scan bar calibrates; one gets banding and a hokey image;a dn with our unit the scanner had to be level. All in all we got alot of great shots of the lights on the ceiling by using a super fast F2.5 Aero Ektar 178mm lens.

[kelly_flanigan1]

Talk of using a flatbed scanner on a view camera is almost 2 decades old now; its like the Silicon Film adapter for slrs; or the 100 MPG carb; or running ones car on water; a nice dream when one ignores engineering and has one lives in Hogwarts.

[drew bedo]

Kelly: I apologize for being digitally naive, and behind the cutting edge of technical innovation. I still think of my cell ‘phone as, well….a telephone.

[jim_z]

Drew -

 

Don't be bummed by the responses, amazing things often happen when someone asks "why can't I ..." Sure, its been tried ... but sometimes the question is "how recently was it tried?". Technology moves on, as shown by the fact that scanners have become better and better while the price dropped, and its always possible that modern scanners might work better than when a few venturesome souls tried it 20 years ago. I always remember asking our computer guru at work about a device that was runnng off a mainframe-type computer "why can't we run them off a PC?". Didn't seem dumb to me, PC's had gotten better and more powerful. He immediately said, "Well, because ..." and there was silence as he started to consider the question. None of the computer weenies had considered that question for 7-8 years. And within a year we had all 12 of these devices running off PC's! So it never hurts to ask the question, even if it was asked before, because things change.

 

By the way, my cell phone too is just for phone calls ...

[michael_darnton1]

http://web.archive.org/web/20060205050520/www.scannerphotography.com/

[mendel_leisk]

*Finally* found something I had bookmarked:

 

http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-better-scanner-cam.html

 

Some interesting large format with flat bed scanner experiments and examples here. Galen, per your item #3, this guy goes out of his way to be in the image twice, when doing one 360 degree panorama.

[frank_menesdorfer]

Not much of the news and not much of quality either. I don't know why bother at all just look into this site and it's done with a regular 360 degree camera based on 120 rolls.

 

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/panorama/pages/galler_ca_e.html

 

and don't forget to click on "why? how?"

[drew bedo]

Hello Jim Z,

 

I found this paper by Wang and Heidrich in another thread here, or maybe on “another forum”. They put together

a scanner and camera system that works pretty well in static studio situations; and yes….they DID get that rig

to make pictures, but JEEZE they had to seriously modify the scanner. They chose to do multiple scans through an

RBG filter wheel for color shots and still had to do software gymnastics to manage color balance and scanner

artifacts. It is impressive from an academic viewpoint, but not really a DIY project.

 

The paper is now four years old…an eon in Digi-Years! As you pointed out, with the advances in both software and

gear today, there has got to be a way to do this at home with stuff from Best Buy (or E-bay). Link to paper:

 

 

 

I have seen a few hundred bucks worth of Wii remote, Blue-Tooth what-it and Radio-Shack parts made to emulate a

$6000 Smart Screen on You Tube by Johnny Lee:

 

(

.

 

Can’t some 14 yr-old hacker kluge together some scanner with, say, an I-Phone and a Giga-gig pocket drive to

come up with a low-cost, practical scanning back for a view camera?

Thanks for the support JZ.

 

Drew Bedo

 

www.quietlightphoto.com