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Showing posts with the label CCD

How do Scanners work?

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So it's 11:45 p.m. and you're laying alone on your dust ridden bed watching fancy television series (GoT, maybe) and suddenly your phone lines up with a message from a friend who reminds you of a deadline to submit a copy of a very important document, to the administration, that is sitting in your closet dust covered. So you're going to take a picture of it with your phone but you realize your crappy built-in phone camera and the poor lighting from the dingy bare bulb hanging from the ceiling just aren't helping. So decisively you dash to your PC and use your flatbed scanner and as you sit there listening to the whirling of the scanning mechanism and pondering how your life got to this point you find yourself asking how the heck do these things work anyway. Great question, your typical scanner uses something called a charge-coupled device or CCD to determine what's on the page. The main idea here being that the CCD can convert light into an electrical cha...