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Has there been any experiments scanning glasses in situ with a delidded flatbed scanner? (apologies, not sure where to post this question!)


johnparker007
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As per the title, was wondering if any experiments have been done with scanning machine glasses with ideally an A5 scanner (delidded).

So you'd use a flatbed scanner like this:
Unmodified Canon LiDE 90 Scanner

And delid (ideally it'd prob want to be an A5 scanner to fit flush inside smaller glass areas), with as small a bezel as possible on at least 2 of the four sides).
Back of Modified Scanner

Then it can be placed facedown on glass of machine (switched off) still installed in machine, and would in theory provide very high quality scans (that would need some skilled stitching to reassemble)... compared to unevenly lit photos.
Detail of Scanner on Map

Or, maybe it wouldn't - perhaps reflections of the scanning light on the fruit machine glass would be an issue...

I remember mucking about with A4 flatbed scanners in the 90s so there must be plenty of cheap old used ones out there, so perhaps a cheap experiment to hack one up.  Then of course you'd need lots of fruit machines to scan though :)  

I've looked into the modern handheld ones that you manually move over the subject, they generally seem crap (distorted output as the tracking is inaccurate).  A stitching of flatbed scans of an off machine seem like they could be perfectly stitched if care is taken when scanning wrt alignment etc.


Edit:  very brief look on eBay, A5 seems rare, used A4 seems as very cheap as expected (so no real loss if hacking it up goes wrong) - example of very cheap A4 used scanner that could work:
Image 11 - Canon CanoScan Lide220 A4 Scanner

Image 3 - Canon CanoScan Lide220 A4 Scanner

3 out of 4 sides have relatively small bezel... you'd still lose maybe 1cm on the edges, that'd need to be stitched in with photos I guess - maybe it's all a bit complicated :)  - though if you had the cooperation of someone with a large collection of machines, you could end up with potentially very high quality source images (without having to do anything to the fruit machines, just scan the glass while still installed).

Edited by johnparker007

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4 hours ago, serene02 said:

I’ve used my works a3 scanner for my Miami Dice fruit machine glasses.  I’ve still got the scans, they’re huge!!

J

Yeah, that of course is ideal :)  I was just thinking, where you have people who have home collections, or places like the Mr P's arcades... or privately owned old seaside town arcades that might allow some scanning in exchange for cash...

As it wouldn't involved taking photos in the arcade, which I can understand some arcades are against, so as to protect the privacy of their customers... it'd just be like a laptop/netbook, a hacked up flatbed scanner on a long USB, and perhaps some kind of powerbank setup.  Then you could turn the machines off one at a time, and work your way around. 

I'm guessing the Miami Dice glasses you scanned turned out basically perfect then?  So, evenly lit, no 'flash-burn' type artifacts, very high res?  And in focus?  As the scanner expects the sample to be at the distance of the scanner glass, but in practice it's a little further away due to the additional thickness of the fruit machine glass.

Of course, with removing them, you also got to scan the mask on the back - this idea of the portable scanner would just be limited to scanning the front artwork, the masks would need manually building...

In the vpinball community, they certainly struggle far less for decent source art these days... though there were also far fewer different pinball machines built, whereas fruit machines they just churned out, and they were also region-specific so I guess that is always gonna be the bottleneck on high quality art... too many machine variants to be able to get physical access to them all to do decent captures.

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[ Arcade Simulator ] Pre-alpha installer: http://arcadesimulator.net  |  Known Issues: https://tinyurl.com/yz4uom2e  |  Donation info: https://tinyurl.com/yzvgl4xo
[ Community Drive ] The drive: http://tinyurl.com/yckze665
[ Fruit Machine Database ] Initial google sheets (WIP): https://tinyurl.com/2c5znxzz
[ MFME Launch ] Source code: https://github.com/johnparker007/MFMELaunch
[ Oasis ] Source code: https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis
[ Sound ROM Editor ] Source code: https://github.com/johnparker007/SoundRomEditor

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