What do you call it/where do you get it?

You can get macro lenses with illumination rings just for such things, and a mini tripod to hold the camera steady.

If you want really good pictures...

Microscopes usually include good illumination setups. They often have a 3rd port setup for a camera. Some have no eye-ball ports, just USB to your computer.

For a chip, you don't need high magnification, at least relative to what many other people need.

Try searching for inspection microscope or disecting microscope. Most of what you find will probably be more expensive than you will like but you might find something that catches your eye or get some ideas.

I don't need that magnification... I'm just talking macro shots of I/C packages on PCB's. ...Jim Thompson

Macro lens

Depends on the camera you have/want.

hamilton

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I've got a rather expensive Manfrotto tripod with a pan/tilt head that I use with my Nikon D80 and a macro lens for taking photographs like that.

Leon

I have a giant copy board with lights around the outside, and the DSLR mounted above, and controlled from my computer's USB port. I have a macro lens and ring flash for very close work. Also a couple portable diffuser boxes for product shots (one home-made from instructions on the net using plastic tubing from Home Despot, and one smaller portable commercial one).

Or, for occasional use and no cost, take a white pizza box, add background if you want, haul it outside on a cloudy day, and point the camera on a tripod down at the ground. Use a remote release dongle or just use the internal timer set to a second or two to avoid shake. You could probably simulate the cloudy day on a sunny day by draping a K-mart bed sheet over some kind of supports.

Once you get a good high-res photo using diffuse light, you can fix anything else (like the PCB not being 100% straight or minor keystoning, color balance, contrast and brightness) in Photoshop or your favorite image editing program. Photoshop makes it particularly easy to do rectangular PCBs with the perspective crop feature.

I use a macro stand for *really* close closeups (e.g., a few inches). A tripod when I have to "get back a bit (put the target on the floor with tripod looking down onto it). And a CCD imager on a gooseneck sitting on my desk (tied to the PIP input on one of my monitors) when I need to look at something "up close" but don't want to dig out a magnifying glass.

You can also buy cheapie tripods (with *flexible* legs) for small, lightweight digital cameras and bend them into an appropriate shape to "look down".

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I have a "copy stand" which is for taking photos of photos; but I use it for photos of PCBs. It has a camera mount which slides up and down. I bought a camera with macro mode; but I think you get better depth of focus with the camera further away on high zoom. If you have any perfectionist tendencies, you can spend ages with lighting / shadows and squaring the camera up perfectly to the object.

A ringlight is helpful, here, too!

All the tripods I've used (which is not many and are not expensive ones) can tilt the head so that the camera points downward, including a $40 Vivicam. I use floor tripods (not table top types). I just place the tripod on the floor close to the table. Here's a picture I took with that method of a LAN chip that was literally blown up by lightning:

Please note that -

1. This was not in macro
2. It was a casual snap: no great care was taken to get a pro grade image
3. It was taken on my porch under natural lighting
4. This picture was heavily downsized and compressed to reduce the file size (I was still on dial-up when I uploaded it)

I have other pictures, but this is the only one on my on-line album at the moment.

A copy stand.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

A decent basic tripod that allows the pan tilt head to be attached to the top or bottom of the rising centre stem would probably do what you want and be flexible enough to cope with most things.

You might also want to get a set of extension rings so you can push the macro scale a bit further for higher magnification close ups.

A ringflash is an optional extra but they are expensive. Handy if you need to do a lot of close up macro work without worrying about lighting. Otherwise a north facing window and a steady hand will do it.

Regards, Martin Brown

Fry Electronics or toys-r-us

Digital imaging microscope from the telescope boy at Celestica.

JT > Trying to take close-ups of chips, is there JT > some kind of stand/tripod to hold a camera JT > pointing downward onto a desk surface? JT > What do you call it/where do you get it?

Mini-tripod, with like 1 foot long legs, Wal-Mart $15

JT > I don't need that magnification... I'm just JT > talking macro shots of I/C packages on PCB's.

Jim, Did you see the full screen photo of a quarter I posted when you asked about this before? I didn't even use a tripod for that, and the newer cheapie digital cameras with 5X Zoom and

A cheapie GE 5X/12 camera would take ID photos of SMT chips.

I had good results with a mini tripod ($10), daylight and some extra room lighting. The most important thing was to manually white balance the camera. Of low cost cameras CANON have by far the best optics and a "super" macro mode that focuses down to 1 cm (0.4 inch). A remote shutter release is a good idea but you can work without it.

Jim Thompson wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Many of the tripods I've used allow you to move the tilt/pan head from the top of the elevation post to the bottom. This places the camera in a position that works great for shooting straight down at an object, like a copy stand, I've also found that, when shooting at extreme close-ups, pushing the trigger can vibrate the camera and blur the image. I use the timed trigger to eliminate that.

Ken

snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

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That's what I do with the Manfrotto tripod I mentioned previously.

I used to use the timer, but I then made my own IR remote. They are made by Nikon, but cost a lot more.

Leon

It's called a copy stand. You can use a tripod if you're not doing this often, but harder to set up. Lighting is the biggest problem. A couple links to lighting suggestions below. I find the gallon plastic milk jug diffuser with two or three work lights with 100 watt equivalent fluorescent bulbs to be very handy. Another way of "photographing" chips is put them on a flat bed scanner. They have sufficient depth of field to scan PCBs with 0.2" tall parts.

Copy stand:

Lighting:

innews: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The Manfrotto thing that's really the most useful is the Magic Arm (sold by Bogen). It's $100 and a thing of great beauty.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs