The Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra 2 scanner sent from Heidelberg for testing and review certainly does an excellent job scanning 3-dimensional objects.

Here are 3D scans of Japanese dolls made of candy.

3-D candy dolls scanned on Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra2 flatbed scanner.

My jump start into digital imaging occurred while a Visiting Professor in Osaka, at Japan's National Museum of Ethnology. This was my third visit to Japan, where I had previously done extensive photography in private collections and museums. At the museum I got to use Sun Sparcstations, Silicon Graphics workstations, and had two dye sub printers assigned to my office. I very quickly learned that Photoshop worked faster on a souped up Mac than the Sun or Silicon Graphics, though those UNIX machines certainly made nice desktop decorations. Unfortunately there were few good scanners there.

Here is a snapshot (with a Nikon CoolPix 950) of the dolls on top of the glass plate of the Linotype-Hell flatbed scanner.

The facial features are on the plastic wrappers, not on the actual candy inside!

I then turned the dolls over to scan them. It took some tape to keep the round candy rolls from rolling into the wrong position (which would hide the facial features.

Each piece of candy is about 9 cm long (with the plastic ends included).

Each stick is about 1 cm thick, which means that the Heidelberg scanner can handle 3-D objects 1 cm thick quite easily.

Elsewhere we have scanned even thicker objects with ease.

Japanese candy dolls scanned on Linotype-Hell flatbed scanner from Heidelberg CPS