Hello, I'm in a need for a scanner for rather special purpose, in which features such as:
- freedom to control the step motors - turn the led lamps off during scan (if not, i'll just disconnect them) - vary ccd gain and gamma for channels individually (i noticed that the canoscan lide 25 driver had this feature) - ability to scan without the scanner head moving (work as a buffered streaming ccd camera) - only powered via usb (no external power required) - least autonomy and be most dependent on the software for best programmability - control scanner focus (though i assume that with cheap scanners the focus is propably preset at the distance of the scanner glass from the ccd surface, this is actually even better) In other words, the scanner would act as a digital scanning back for a certain technical photography purpose. The scanner will be scanning the "film plane" surface at slow speeds and doing multiple scans for the same rows to increase SNR ratio (blending multiple "exposures" together with software that i'm writing). I'm just curious if these scanners are generally able to "stream" the image data in for example simple raw data via the usb or are they so autonomic that they always perform a scan within the set range and output a jpeg/whatever with all the header information via the usb after they are finished? And to the questions regarding: why not just use ccd? - I have access to a couple of digital backs but they are not an optimal solution simply because they output huge amounts of data at a time. I need only lots of data from a certain area of the film plane at a time. A 1 axis ccd row seemed like an optimal solution given that it can output far better resolution than any dv-camera or similar equipment. Also, there are some special lens requirements. So far the plan has been to hook the scanning back to a Mamiya RZ67, which provides an adequate scanning area of 6x7cm. So, for a prototype, any suggestions of semi-cheap (<100 eur) scanner models which would allow as much control as possible via current SANE backends ? The canoscan lide25 seemed like a good choice for starters, but since my experience is restricted to film scanners, i have very little knowledge of modern consumer flatbeds. Also, i'm looking for doing most of the job in software via a hooked laptop which powers the scanner so that minimal hardware modifications would have to be made, because i'm not keen in electronics. Sincerely, Otso Helenius
