saw this on another forum
I have never gotten a decal off without wrecking it.
There are a ton of handheld image scanners available now that either peice the image rows together an inch or so at a time, or have a 6-8 inch width of scan. Some are like .99 cents going no bid on ebay. And many are 89 bucks in battery pen type form brand new. Some do images at like 300x300 dpi.
Some are battery powered with memory like a digital camera. Wouldn't that be cool to walk up to somebody's bike at an OS show, and swipe your battery powered pen scanner across his decals a few times and walk away with the blueprint for your new decals.
With CAD programs you can trace items and create line drawings of things. If you wrap a piece of paper around a JMC vinyl graphic and make a good old fashioned rubbing of it. You can scan it, work it into CAD and anybody can plug it into thier vinyl graphics cutter and make as many as you want that way.
If you trace the outline of the decal, and create an accurately sized outline in the puter, and fit all photos to that outline, the scale should be accurate.
Chrome is a bugger on the scanner, I know that. So are prism sparkles. The reflect the light and make a black mess...
Some interesting ideas with the camera here. But I have to wonder what a 100 dollar handheld scanner could produce as an anytime anywhere solution. I presume that every 3 months the old handheld scanners are infinately outdated, and should be getting cooler in leaps and bounds nowadays. Kind of like digital cameras leaping to 9 megapixels, making 4 megapixels cheap now...
Anybody ever try anything like that?
What ever happened to simple technology like the Silly-putty on the newspaper trick anyway?