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LINEScanner laboratory / Anatomy of an image

Model & guide

Hold line pauses the job at the current line clock. The shared Pause freezes every exhibit clock instead.
+1 line runs the native line clock until exactly one more image row has red, green and blue samples.
Reset scan returns the carriage to the page origin and clears the acquisition.

01 / OriginalFace down

A4 · 210 × 297 mm · fixed on the glass

02 / Acquisition

Resolution

Output

Exposure

Playback speed

Time scaling only; sampling geometry is unchanged.

03 / Inspect

Move carriage

Manual inspection never acquires rows. Moving the carriage clears any running or acquired job, so two positional histories are never mixed in one image.

Probe pixel

Chooses the pixel shown in the signal plot, the color strip, the acquired-image marker and the CCD microscope.

Lid angle · product view

04 / Record

Scan job
Provenance
Conditions

The PNG contains only committed rows (unscanned rows stay transparent) with 8 bits per channel, and embeds the job, settings and condition segments as text.

Clear acquired image removes the rows but keeps the carriage position and settings.

Explore / reduction optics

Light becomes data.

A moving optical laboratory: one narrow strip at a time becomes a complete image.

Focus the scene for keys: Space hold or start · S scan · N one line · R reset · 1–4 views. Drag to orbit, Shift-drag to pan, scroll to zoom while focused.

The page stays still. The scanner does the moving.

A white LED illuminates a narrow strip of the face-down original. The moving head carries the lamp, mirrors, lens and sensor together.

Inspection overlays · light travel is slowed for visibility

LINE

Assembling the optical laboratory

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1990s–2010s · Computing

LINE — Flatbed Scanner Laboratory

Follow light from a still page through three mirrors and a lens onto a color CCD, and watch an image assemble one registered RGB row at a time.

A flatbed scanner never photographs a page. The original lies still, face down on the glass, while a complete optical carriage travels underneath it: a white lamp lights one narrow strip, three mirrors fold the reflected light into a lens, and the lens forms a reduced image of that strip on a sensor only a few centimeters long. The motor supplies the second image dimension, one line clock at a time.

LINE is a representative CCD reduction-optics scanner, not a replica of one product. The exhibit runs the scan itself: the carriage homes, reads a dark and a white reference, then samples red, green and blue rows at their own physical positions, quantizes them with an adjustable ADC and commits an image row only when all three colors are present. You can cover a mirror, release the belt clamp, raise the page out of focus, lower the converter precision or place your own image, which stays in your browser.

It is a teaching model. Source RGB stands in for spectra; there is no diffraction, servo or semiconductor device model; gain, full-well and noise values are illustrative; and the calibration stages are timed steps with a light-path check rather than measured correction tables. Rays and charge packets are slowed and enlarged so they can be followed, and the saved PNG records every condition its rows were acquired under.

Specifications

Optics: Three first-surface mirrors and a 30.06 mm reduction lens (213 mm object, 35 mm image)
Sensor: Trilinear color CCD, 34.51 mm line for a 210 mm page
Line rate: 100 line clocks per second; pitch 25.4 mm / dpi
Resolutions: 75, 150 or 300 dpi on an A4 original
Converter: 6, 8 or 12 bits per channel; PNG saved with 8-bit channels
Scan cycle: Home, dark reference, white reference, position, acquire, return

All exhibits

Light becomes data.

The page stays still. The scanner does the moving.

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