Mike wrote:
>
> Would love to take some pics of a design and might use a camcorder,
> but I'd love to get higher res pics from some sort of frame grabber.

snip-----

> rgds
>
> mike
> Perth, Western Australia

If it's for a PCB design or a PCB design based product Mike, which I'll
assume it is, I have spent a fair amount of time trying to find the best
"Cost Effective" method of getting from design to web page and found
that most domestic video cameras require so much setting up, a lot of
your time vanishes playing around with getting the item into correct
focus, setting up good lighting, checking the output etc.

The smaller it is, the harder to get a good shot. You may have to try
for it outdoors on a sunny day.

I also tried a late model Casio $1000USD digital camera with what I felt
was poor to fair results. Again, the same lighting and focus problems.

I decided to take my PCB treasures to a computer store and see if they
could be scanned in successfully. The best quality output for what I was
trying to do, was achieved with a HP-5P flat bed scanner. No setup,
lighting, or focus problems. You don't even need to save massive amounts
of data on disk as it's so easy to duplicate the shots again, or
attempt to improve them at a later date.

I got the HP mainly because I trust the name and the results were close
to perfect first time. I would think most 24 bit resolution scanners
would give an acceptable result.

The proof?
Have a look at my pics of pics at:
http://www.dontronics.com/index.html
A scanner output.

http://www.dontronics.com/dont/html
The Casio digital Camera output.

and
http://www.dontronics.com/dt205.html
This is a relay board with 4 different types of relays fitted. The
smallest is .25" and the largest 1" high. You can still see the board
tracks even though the flat bed scanner surface is at least an inch from
it.

All of the scanner shots have been reduced in size by 50 to 80%, so a
lot of the detail gets lost. If you only have a small number of products
to show on a Web page, then I guess 100% is fine.

OK, I can't get good 3D shots with a scanner, but I figure an
'any-quality' domestic conventional analog camera and a roll of film
will give me the quality I need to scan the shots at good resolution.

And as a bonus, a scanner is great for those data sheets and mag
articles that are impossible to get. Example:
http://www.dontronics.com/temp
(To say nothing of the family photos to gif conversions, and etc., etc.)

I'm sure other list members will have different opinions.
These are just my findings.

BTW. If your product is in the class of "Planes, Trains, or
Automobiles", get the largest flat bed scanner you can. :-)

Don McKenzie  mailto:don@dontronics.com   http://www.dontronics.com

SimmStick(tm) Atmel & PIC proto PCB's. 30 pin Simm Module Format.
SLI, the serial LCD that auto detects baud rates from 100 to 125K bps.
Send a blank message to mailto:info@dontronics.com for more details.