Willow,  Sorry for the delay in replying.  I just got through a bout of
pneumonia and I'm catching up with correspondence just now.  Basically, as
I indicated in my first transmission regarding my scanning-in of botanical
specimens: I just experiment and examine the results.  Generally, items of
up to 3/4" thickness can be scanned and I wind up using white paper, or
paper cups, and other drappery to exclude extraneous light from the side of
the scanner. (Remember, for some specimens I have to keep the lid up). I
try to have a light reflective background behind the specimen (that is,
opposite the scanning lamp).   And I generally invest an enormous amount of
memory per scan. I have a PowerMac 7100/66 with 40MB of RAM and I have
about 100MB of space available on my hard drive as a scratch disk. My
monitor is still a small, NEC MultiSnec 3V of 15" diagonal measurement. I
have an Agfa Studio IIsi scanner and I usual scan the small specimens @
800dpi.  Which is my maximum resolution.   Larger specimens usual require
lass of a resolution, but it is thje small ones that are the most difficult
to examine without a dissecting microscope.  Therefore, it is the smallish
items that I attempt to scan in at this 800dpi resolution and it is these
self-same items that I am able to view in magnifications of up to 4X
clearly on the monitor.  I save the files as JPEGs of medium compression in
Photoshop. The results, in general are decent.  If you wish I can send you
some Binhexed JPEGs for decoding and viewing, if you are interested.

By the way, there is a terrific site run by Texas A&M depicting scans of
live dragonflies at high resolution.  I think there is also a technical
description of their methods.

Hope this helps.  Mike Rothman [log in to unmask]