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Using your film scanner as a microscope
One afternoon Keith got bored with scanning negatives, and decided to see if the Canon FS4000 film scanner he was using would make a good microscope...
Photomicroscopy on the cheap!
A WARNING! Putting things other than film into an expensive scanner is not a good idea, unless you are very careful!
Keith or Northlight Images takes no responsibility whatsoever if you damage your scanner .
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Scanning small objects
The film scanner I used to use for most of my landscapes is a Canon FS4000US. It scans film at up to 4000 dpi (dots per inch) which is good enough to show the tiny grains of silver that create the image in conventional black and white film, clumps of these show up in pictures and are known as grain (some people hate it, some love it)
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.
For reflective objects you could try a flatbed scanner, but most have a real (optical) resolution much less than the film scanner. If your scanner has a transparency adapter you could try transparent things as well.
Thing to scan also need to be very thin, since the scanner is designed for film and has a very limited depth of field (the thickness of the object that is in focus) I had a walk round the house and came up with the objects below.
The objects are sandwiched between two bits of developed unexposed film and placed into the film holder for scanning. You could use a transparency mount just as well, but it would take a little more care in preparation.
The pictures below all have a small bar on them to give an indication of scale. This was added using Photoshop's ruler tool which will allow you to measure things on the screen if your images are still at the original scan resolution.
I've also had the suggestion that old Microfiche readers make good low power display microscopes for classroom use (typically x25 to x40) Unfortunately I haven't got one in the office to try :-(( --Thanks to Bruce Butterfield
First try - some onion cells
Have you ever noticed that very thin almost transparent film that you can peel off the inside layers of onions?
A very thin bit of onion. This is the whole 35mm film frame
An enlarged section, showing individual onion cells
Notice the scale bar - these are big cells
A Honey Bee Wing
A dead honey bee donated one of its wings.
There are some fine filaments visible which might be fungal growth, since the bee had been on the window sill for some time.
Click on the image for a much bigger version, where you can even see some of the tiny hairs on the wing (I didn't know bees had hairy wings before)
Feather
The feather was a white soft downy one which had blown in the window...
Feather tip.
Notice that since this is not a flight feather there are no barbs to hold it together
The core of the feather
Wind born seed
This is the fluffy bit of a seed that also blew in the through the window - the actual seed has fallen out leaving the hole
Click on the image for larger image (bar is 0.5mm)
Sugar and salt crystals
Sugar and salt crystals (and some dust)
Be very careful with ones like this!
Eyebrow hair
It would seem that a hint of greyness is developing :-))
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Notice how the transparent bit refracts the image of the hair below it.
This picture was increased to 8000 dpi in ~10% steps and sharpened quite a bit in Photoshop. It's probably about as detailed as you will get with the FS4000.
All the scans were made using Vuescan, and have been processed to varying degrees in Adobe Photoshop.
The pictures have been somewhat reduced in quality compared to the originals for putting on the web.
A discussion about this and other matters relating to web image quality is in the 'Webphotos' section.
The black and white pictures were simply desaturated, as opposed to one of the more complex methods discussed in the Digital Black and White article.
For more general scanning information see our links and information section.
Keith is always happy to discuss matters raised in his articles. You can use our Contact Form 
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The views above represent those of Keith Cooper. Articles copyright ©2003-9 Keith Cooper.
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