Henry, it's great to have someone of your technical expertise respond on this forum. For those of us who might be shopping for a scanner that can capture a high resolution image such as some shown in this thread, what is the single most important feature in the build of a scanner to achieve this?
Thanks again for your input.
Thank you for welcoming me, PDC.
There are some points to consider when you choose a good scanner. Maybe they are resolution(data sharpness),accuracy, cleanness, easy of use, price, support and so on.
The resolution depends on the point spacing and the point spacing is calculated by the ratio between number of camera pixels and scan area. If you have high resolution camera with small scanning area, you will get the best point spacing. The best means the shortest point-to-point distance.
And normally dental scanners have similar scanning area because they are scanning a full arch model in ONE scan shot.
So I think the single most important feature for high resolution is the camera resolution to take 3D data (NOT the camera for color texture).
BUT I want to talk about some exceptions.
Some of scanners use high resolution cameras for good specifications and do big smoothing on the data, because they could not get clean 3D data. So they apply a lot of smoothing for making the data clean. During this smoothing process, it looses sharpness but keep high resolution.
The other exception is that some good scanners have smaller scanning area. For example old Lava scanner uses less than 1 mega pixel camera but it can get very sharp data, because it has small scanning area. Their scanning area is much smaller than current normal dental desktop scanners.
And normally intra-oral scanners have good sharpness with lower resolution camera because of their scanning area is very small.
I know my opinion is not 100% correct. If there are something wrong, please correct me.
Thank you and have a great holiday.