A revolutionary new technology to capture large area objects at amazing digital resolution

Ideal for:
 Natural History Collections
 Entomological Archives
 Botanical Archives
 Palaeontology
 Archaeology
 Earth Sciences
 Zoology
 Museums
 Private collectors
 Auction houses
 Manuscript Scanning

Preserve your collections by scanning them at the highest possible resolution
Reduce future specimen handling and disturbance
Make your collections available digitally
Freeze the condition of your collection in time
Uniform scale throughout the whole image allows accurate measurements to be made over the whole image

A unique combination of automation equipment with state of the art software to provide automated capture and data to assemble multiple fields of view to generate extremely high resolution images with huge a depth of field. Multiple fields are achieved by moving motion control hardware carrying cameras across a subject and taking digital images at precisely monitored positions. This information is passed to software, which can be presented to stitching algorithms to stitch adjacent fields and produce a very high resolution output. The system is able to produce an incredibly high resolution image over the whole sample area with no lens distortion

Ultra - High Resolution - Low Distortion

The unique blend of technologies utilised in SatScan Collections allows large collections to be imaged at resolutions far higher than any current standard digital camera is capable of achieving and without the many forms of associated artefacts and lens distortions that would otherwise be present. The images of the copper tubes below highlight this effect, the image taken with a conventional digital camera shows clear rings in the centre, but increasingly shows the tube walls towards the edges along with lens induced scale distortion; in the image produced by SatScan all the tubes are shown perpendicular with uniform scaling and no lens distortion. Another example is shown below; a sheet of 5x5mm squared paper has been imaged using a high quality 10Mp digital camera in macro mode and using SatScan. Barrel distortion is clearly visible in the conventional digital camera shot, but is not present in the SatScan version.

Whilst a certain amount of software correction can improve the effects of distortion and artifacts, it cannot fix the missing data; capturing the image correctly will always produce a more accurate result.
The examples below is zoomed in from the larger image and clearly shows details, including the text on the specimen card, that would be missing in a conventional digital camera image due to lack of resolution. Because each image is taken from directly above we are also able to ensure that the specimens are not obscured by box sides and other specimens, which would be the case with conventional photography due to parallax effects. The images of the collections trays below demonstrate this unique view, with tray edges perfectly presented and uniform scale over the whole image.

The flexible nature of the system hardware and software allows for many different customisations including automated load/unload of specimen trays, multi-spectral imaging (including IR & UV Fluorescence), laser profile measurement, scan area and illumination.