Cambo announced a new Copy Stand system at this year’s Photokina. Copy stands are used in Art Reproduction and the digization of gallery/museum archives as well as speciality applications.

The heart of the system is a Cambo Wide DS which guarantees the sensor plane and lens plane are in exact alignment while allowing the use of large format digital lenses from Schneider. The Cambo Wide DS body includes generous shift left/right and rise/fall which means that, when especially high resolution is required, the effective resolution of the digital back can be more than doubled by stitching two or three captures without moving the lens by using the rear shift capability.

Each Schneider lens has been placed into an extended mount designed specifically for this application – the mount includes a barrel extension that allows for a wide range of document sizes to be easily focused. Schneider Digitar XL lenses are extremely high resolution and show almost no issues such as chromatic aberration or distortion.

The lens is controlled by an Schneider Electronic Shutter System which is guaranteed during it’s warranty for one million captures (per lens). Some competitive camera systems use leaf shutter lenses which are expected to fail in 30,000-60,000 captures, a number that seems high until you realize that in many gallery/museum situations the camera will be used to capture many hundreds of documents each day. The control for the electronic shutter is at the computer station allowing control of shutter speed, aperture, shutter release, and live view directly from the computer station.

The camera is mounted on a newly designed column with electronically controlled ultra-fine movements. The dial to control camera position has both a fast/slow switch as well as a fine-grain dial which allows the speed to be reduced to nearly visually imperceptible speed. The column can be free standing, or for added physical stability mounted to a sturdy wall.