Does it have to be one photo? If you reproduced a spinning drive but with the camera positioned to see half of the spinning disc, I wonder if it could capture the "stream" of pixels in one arc of the spinning disc
You would still need some significant magnification. And there might also be a measurement latency issue if the disc is in motion (the camera CCD might not be fast enough to capture the image before it rotates away).
The optics of a CD-ROM drive are optimized for something pretty different than the optics of a camera. But if you made enough tweaks and adaptations, sure, the data is ultimately there and can be captured by a different kind of sensor than the one it was designed for. It would be a cool project.
I'm mostly just pointing out that adapting your camera to successfully capture billions of sub-micrometer features isn't that trivial.
schoen|7 months ago
The optics of a CD-ROM drive are optimized for something pretty different than the optics of a camera. But if you made enough tweaks and adaptations, sure, the data is ultimately there and can be captured by a different kind of sensor than the one it was designed for. It would be a cool project.
I'm mostly just pointing out that adapting your camera to successfully capture billions of sub-micrometer features isn't that trivial.