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.

You may laugh - I do this:

Gorilla-Pod (Google it - great invention) wrapped around the old- fashioned fluorescent lamp that hangs over my desk. From which digital camera dangles. Using close-up mode. Wiggle desk lamp until camera points where you want and to what depth. Take photo.

Should appeal to the frugal in all of us :-)

-- Silvar Beitel

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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=A0 | =A0 =A0 et =A0 =A0 =A0|

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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.

Here is a good low cost copy stand. They are out of stock right now but should be able to get them shortly:

B & H is very reliable.

Tom

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

You mean a Focusing Rail? Goes between the cam and tripod so you can move cam + macro lens forwards/backwards tiny amounts for focus and side to side (not so useful). The one I have is called a four-way focusing rail and I found it s/h on eBay. Also need a ballmount to angle the cam.

Grant.

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

pimpom Inscribed thus:

Thats a hole in one... ;-)

Called a copy stand (or big ones, 'copy camera'); used for things like microfilming newsprint. Have you tried putting your mainly-flat items onto a flatbed scanner? Some scanners have really good depth of field.

High end copy cameras are going for pennies on the used market, because digital imaging has got so adept at working around the keystone/distortion issues of careless camera aiming.

Fry Electronics or toys-r-us

Digital imaging microscope from the telescope boy at Celestica.

:-) The motherboard was that of a computer I assembled for someone back in 2004. The young man linked it with about two dozen friends in a neighbourhood gaming LAN. He'd had his new computer for only two days when lightning struck a nearby house, partially vaporising a disused TV antenna. The young man was out and the computer wasn't even turned on. The +5V rail was shorted to ground. I couldn't provide warranty for a lightning strike, so I replaced the mobo at cost.

Some 2 years later, I had an inspiration. I downloaded the datasheet of the LAN chip and identified the supply pin. I desoldered the pin and the short disappeared. I happened to have a spare Athlon XP CPU from a previous upgrade, put that in and powered up the motherboard. Lo and behold, it worked perfectly. I fitted a discrete LAN card, HDD, monitor, etc - all spare used parts accumulated over the years, mostly discarded by customers from upgrades. The result was a complete computer for zero cost. My daughter is still using it and she says that she has no need for a faster machine.