As I look at pictures of camera-scanning setups, I can't help but have a persistent worry: what if all of these weights on long poles are just pendulums waiting for a bump to start swinging. Of course, the manufacturers claim that their stands are as steady as rock, as stable as an Egyptian pyramid, as solid as gold bullions. However, I am not fully convinced. If I were to tell you that a camera on such a stand moving just 1/10 the thickness of a human hair during exposure would result in a loss of half the resolution, would you be concerned? So, in this article, I'll present my arguments and show you how to check and possibly secure your own scanning setup against vibrations. Blurring the edges Certainly, let's start from the basics and define what is meant by "blur".  Blurring on a camera occurs as a result of movement of the camera, subject, or both. Motion blur specifically refers to the streaking or smearing seen in the image due to this movement [1].   On th...

I have a customer who is going to use @VladsTestTarget to calibrate the height of  Epson V850 flatbed scanner's film holders.  Hope that will be helpful to other folks too. Here is the question and below is my answer.   Q. "I am ordering this target to calibrate the height of my Epson V850 flatbed scanner film holders. Currently I am not satisfied with my film holder height adjustment attempts. I seems to unable to reach the peak of sharpness. My type 120 slides are all tack sharp on the light table with 6x loupe, but not so in the scanned output. Once I load test target in my scanner, I will evaluate a series of scans at different settings with my naked eye on my computer screen. One thing I am afraid of now is that I may not notice differences among 10~20(?) scans. I can narrow down the short list, but I am afraid I can hardly pinpoint which one or two scans are the absolute best in terms of sharpness. How can test targets help?" A.  Dear fellow digitizer! Please r...