This is the new MARC project camera which uses a CCD array chip and a mechanical micro/macro-positioning system. It is capable of imaging objects at up to 20kx20k resolution and high colour accuracy (Lab delta E average for MacBeth chart of around 3). The output data is colorimetric, ie CIE Lab. It can be connected to a SUN workstation with an SBUS interface. It has been used to produce an accurate colour catalogue of paintings from the Alte Pinakotek in Munich, as part of the final demonstration of the MARC project. This book is the first (as far as we know) to be from calibrated digitally imaging and calibrated press output. It has consistent colour throughout and tests next to the paintings in Munich show an excelent match. The National Gallery in London also uses one for high quality imaging directly from paintings and the Byzantine museum in Greece has one.
The camera uses conventional white photographic lights and takes around 30 minutes to produce a high resolution scan. The output images can be up to 1.6Gigabytes uncompressed! For this reason a fast SUN workstation is used, with at least 64 MBytes of RAM and a very fast 4GB disk system (note old specs!). (new systems use 1GB RAM and PCI bus card with fibre-linked camera)
CCD
Structure
Microscanning
Macroscanning
Links to: vips/ip