130 Megapixel Scanner Camera

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn9ZoaPIHQc]

Made from a 1200 dpi epson scanner and a manual focus canon lens, this camera captures 130 Megapixel images. With a resolution of 13,068 x 10,173, these pictures are very detialed. You can see some examples in his flickr set. It doesn’t look like they’re the full size originals though.  If you want to build your own, here’s a good start. Keep in mind that it’s from 2004 though.

33 thoughts on “130 Megapixel Scanner Camera

  1. The Japanese-ification of “scanner” strikes me as a little strange. I would have expected a simple カ rather than キャ. Anyone qualified to comment here?

  2. The transliteration of English to Japanese often surprises native English speakers. For example, “candy” is turned into キャンデ not カンデ; “violin” is usually written ヴァイオリン instead of バイオリン ; “shirt” becomes シャツ and so forth. I don’t know why, but it is often the case.

  3. @zahlman

    It is not strange at all. It is common practice to make the japanese pronunciation as close to the original language (within the limitation of the kana) as possible.

  4. Awesome post! I had thought about doing something like this, but I’m glad to see some people have already done it. Maybe I’ll try to improve on their designs.

    One thing I noticed on the full resolution images is that they are blurry. 35mm lenses were never designed to handle this resolution. It would be nice to see how much sharper the image is if they used a large format lens.

  5. @sexiewasd

    Keep telling yourself that hair came from his arm and I’ll do the same :)

    “I built a scanner camera, and all I have to show for it are these hi-res pubes”

  6. @countchocula

    I agree that’s the biggest technical hurdle of the project, but when I first read the post, I thought the slower speed of the scan might be able to produce some pretty interesting results…

    I imagine aiming this thing down a busy downtown area in maybe New York or some such place. Huge stationery buildings all around, and maybe a few cross-streets with heavy traffic. It seems to me all the stationery objects would show up as expected, but the stream of moving objects I could only imagine would show up as a stream of mis-matched patches in strips perpendicular to the direction of travel.

    I would love to toy around with a device like this, I’m sure you could produce some pretty interesting artistic type shots.

  7. An interesting use for this would be to set it up on the finish line of a race. You’d get a bit of distortion based on speed, but assuming everyone arrives at close to the same time you would get a cool bunched together shot of all of the runners in placing order, letting their movement do the work of the scan. That, and the ground in the photo would all be the color of the finish line, which is usually a brilliant white, so it would make the scene a little surreal.

  8. This looks like an improvement over a couple of older scanner camera experiments I’ve seen. It still suffers the limitation of a fixed “shutter” speed, such that *any* movement will lead to interesting effects.

    I’ve got a number of old dig cameras in my junk drawer. I wish I had the bsEE brain with which to create a hybrid sensor array on a common focal plane (as opposed to an array of cameras), roughly along the lines of the PanSTARRS ccd array: http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/design-features/cameras.html

  9. When I opened a 3rd large one in both firefox and then an external viewer it did slow my system down like mad I must say, but FF was OK and didn’t crash or anything.
    This on 32bit XP, single core system.

  10. Opened fine for me, and all I can say is… wow, detailed!

    I noticed the text on the right side of the image was more blurred than the text on the left – but that might have to do with the angles of the objects, I suppose.

    I have FF 3.0 – with mem cache bumped up to 256MB on an old Athlon XP w/ 1GB of RAM.

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