Building Hybrid Scanner Cameras

Hi all,

Thought some here might be interested in some hybrid scanner-oriented builds. I've just put together this post with video to show and discuss a couple of the scanner camera builds I've worked on. These are builds intended to use economically priced commercially available flatbed scanners, not photographically-purposed high-end scanning backs like Betterlight and similar much more expensive solutions. I got into this because of an interest in the inherent artifacts that occur when trying to record images using conventional document/photo flat bed scanners and I think the results are very interesting and worth exploring. Thats all for now. Hope you find it interesting

Here is the blog post: https://www.absolutelyanalog.com/blog/2022/10/4/building-hybrid-scanner-cameras

Here is the YouTube video:

Hi
Did they sell large "DocuScanners" are they sold on eBay, and are they like your scanner that was with the USB cable ?
Thank you, good video .

crafmatic said:

Hi
Did they sell large "DocuScanners" are they sold on eBay, and are they like your scanner that was with the USB cable ?
Thank you, good video .

Click to expand...

I don't keep up with the different and constantly changing document scanners on the market. These projects were just to experiment and see what kind of results I could get with the materials available at the time. If you'd like to make something similar, you'll need to do some light research and first identify what scanners are available now and if any meet your requirements i.e. battery powered (like the Doxy), USB powered (like the old HP that I mentioned), or anything else that you might want. Sorry I can't help you further there.

What I'm really interested in is reversing the process and using an enlarger to project a negative onto the bed of a flatbed scanner. I did some tests last year and did manage to resolve an image, although exposure and alignment were very tricky. Very cool project though.

Very interesting, thank you for sharing! I also benefited from this post by following your link and looking at your website... Very good stuff!
I particularly liked your video on building the 20x24 camera: https://www.absolutelyanalog.com/blog/2022/7/5/i-built-a-giant-20x24-camera

Keep up the great work!
Lew