Leaf Lumina (1994)

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The Leaf Lumina was announced 1994. It was a professional studio camera designed as a copystand camera but was soon used for all kinds of product photography. The camera was a line-scanning camera with a trillinear CCD, SCSI-2 port and Nikon-F lens mount. It would only work with a Macintosh computer. Scan time was about 15 - 120 seconds depending on resolution. The file size of an image scanned in full resolution was about 26MB large. Sets were available with lenses and a slide illuminator. The slide illuminator or slide copier initially costed around $2,000 but was later included as a free bonus in the Leaf Lumina set. Also the camera could only be operated by using a Macintosh or Personal Computer which would cost the owner another $5,000.

Today, the Leaf Lumina still exists, if you can dig one up, but operating it proves difficult because of the scarceness of the hard- and software you need. Leaf Systems Inc. was a subsidiary of Scitex Corp. Above you can take a look inside the Leaf Lumina. These are the first ever pictures of an opened Lumina on the web. Clearly visible is the line scanning mechanism.