Thrifty Thursday: Insect Wings on a Cheap Scanner
By Alex Wild
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500.
[HP deskjet F4280 printer/scanner - $150]
A few weeks ago I took wings off a dead periodical cicada and stuck them in my basic desktop scanner/printer/copier just to see what the machine could do. I was pleased. A cheap scanner can make journal-quality technical illustrations of 2-dimensional subjects. I thought, "I'm gonna have to try this again".
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So I did. The periodical cicadas have passed, replaced by midsummer dog-day cicadas. The image above is a 1200 dpi scan of the green-trimmed fore and hind wings of a cicada from the back yard.
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