I have this old trilobite fossil that I bought from the Discovery Store. I find it kind of neat to have a specimen from 530 million years ago sitting on my desk. I made this picture by plopping the fossil onto the flatbed scanner at work and just scanning it at 300dpi. The original scan was a 2.8megabyte TIFF file, which I processed a bit with GIMP to form the image on the right. Using scanners to make pictures of shallow objects is an idea I’ve talked about before, but this was a nice application.

At home I have a Canon LIDE 20 scanner, which uses an LED light source, but it really doesn’t make very nice pictures (they get fuzzy quickly as the depth falls away from the bed of the scanner), but it was super cheap. It’s okay for doing coins, but pictures of things with deeper focus is not really satisfactory. Try scanning objects on your own scanners and see how they turn out.