What happens if you scan the mirror. What happens if you scan the mirror? Video with the experiment, photo of the scanned mirror. What happens if you scan a mirror: an incredible photo experiment

Visitors to various educational sites are often interested in the result of such a procedure as mirror scanning. There are many speculations on this subject. The most likely site is " In the countryside" considers such an assumption that the internal structure of the scanner will be reflected in the scanned mirror. Along with these assumptions, the opinion is also expressed that a sheet of paper will come out of the scanner absolutely clean or light will be reflected on it.

Some interesting opinions should be cited:
- The scanner carriage with the lamp will be printed on the sheet.
- After scanning, a strongly blurred reflective side of the scanner will be reflected on the sheet, that is, a photograph of the scanner carriage with an optical system, which will be strongly overexposed. The photo will be as if with a long exposure. The result is a photographic image that will contain very often, and little separated bands. But since these stripes are difficult to distinguish with a simple glance, the viewer will see only a white sheet.
- Since the mirror is associated with the other world, many hope to see in it those people who looked into this mirror before. In addition, many hope to see otherworldly creatures in the mirror.
- The scanner may break if you scan a mirror on it.
- You can see the country through the looking glass.
- Wonderland, which was visited by Alice.

Such assumptions give only new vague hypotheses, but everything can be found out as a result of a simple experiment. Such an experience takes no time and is absolutely effortless.
So what will be the result of the scan
You need to take a simple mirror, which roughly corresponds to the format of a printed sheet, that is, A4. We lay out the mirror on the scanning surface. If the mirror has a base, then the scanner lid is unlikely to close. We press the button and wait for the result.

The result of such an experiment was not a white blank sheet at all, and in the bright light reflected on the paper, an absolutely black sheet of A4 paper floated out of the scanner. If the mirror was damaged or had any fasteners, then these places will be reflected as whitish spots.
Explanations for this result.

To make it clear, it is necessary to explain how modern scanners work: the carriage moves tangentially to the scanner tablet. On this scanner carriage there is a special lamp, which should illuminate the object to be scanned. Light beams are reflected from the scanned object and will be captured by the charge coupler device (CCD). The larger currents in this device are created by more reflected light, which changes the value of the pixels that are transmitted to the computer. The more light, the smaller the pixel value.

As you may have noticed, in the last few years, the Internet has begun to resemble a problem book from the Questions and Answers series. See for yourself: if before people on the network asked simple queries, most often consisting of one word, today they can consist of a whole sentence. The number of such questions is huge, and some of them are so strange and funny that we devoted separate articles to them. Remember, for example, a comic article about. Today we will talk about a no less funny and yet quite interesting question that haunts many users. So what happens if you scan the mirror? Let's find the answer together.

In fact, there are a lot of discussions about this. Let's try to put together a few opinions. Here is what Runet users think.

  • The most popular reasoning boils down to the fact that when scanning an object, we should see an overexposed image of a light shade. It is believed that this is possible due to the large reflectance, which is present in the entire range of the visible spectrum. It also contributes to a huge exposure. In other words, the output paper will be white. By the way, there is also an opinion that it is not the leaf that will become white, but the mirror itself. Well, let's test this theory.
  • It is theoretically possible that the scanner will simply break. We immediately dismiss this version, since we had to scan many different objects and so far not a single scanner has failed.
  • Since the mirror has an unusual ability to remember those people who once looked into it (even those hundreds of years ago), then there is a chance that we will see all these people on it. Let's say in advance that this is just a legend invented in order to scare you.
  • The mirror is considered a kind of portal to another dimension, which, by the way, is very active on our website. Recommended reading, the user comments are especially interesting. So, there is an opinion that an otherworldly portal will open, where you can please forever. Of course, all this is just fiction and nothing like this will happen.
  • Finally, there are completely playful opinions from the series “the Easter bunny will appear in front of you”, which, again, is not true.

But enough of the lyrics, let's start our experiments. We only need a mirror and the most common scanner, which in our case was a device of a well-known brand with a resolution of 300 dpi. We put the mirror, cover it with a lid and press the button ... And now attention - we get an almost black image! The first thought was that it was the printer settings - we used the color settings "Grey, 16 bit". Let's try to replace the gray image with a color one. We scan again and ... To be honest, the difference is not very noticeable to the eye, only now a few spots of a grayish tint have appeared on the sheet. Actually, for the reason that we see an almost black image on a piece of paper, we did not publish it - it's the same as looking at a black square.

It should be noted that our mirror is small and, more importantly, it has no frame. Therefore, we quickly find another mirror that has a white frame. We scan it, get the result and ... There is a difference! Now we can clearly see the white frame on the image, which has not changed at all, but the color of the mirror has remained almost black.

What conclusion can be drawn from the above? Believe less in all sorts of stories, well, do not be lazy to check the facts yourself. Good luck.

Photo: Shutterstock.com / Glovatskiy

Curious Internet users are wondering: "What happens if you scan the mirror"? Getting the answer is quite simple if you do the experiment yourself. It does not require any effort and does not take much time. It is not difficult to find a mirror; many people have a scanner at home or at work. But not everyone decides to find the answer to this unusual question empirically - there is a version that as a result of scanning the mirror, the device may fail.

What other versions are there?

There are at least three more, at first glance, plausible versions of what can be obtained as a result of mirror scanning:

1. image of the internal parts of the scanner, for example, carriages and lamps, which will be reflected by the mirror;

2. a light spot, which is formed due to the reflection of the glow of the scanner lamp;

3. dark spot.

And what actually happens?

In fact, if you scan a mirror, its image on a computer or on a sheet of paper will be represented by a black spot. If there were scratches on the mirror, light lines or spots will correspond to them in the scanned image.

Why it happens?

This is due to the principle of the scanner. During scanning, a carriage with a lamp moves along the working area, which illuminates the object. The reflected rays of light are recorded by a special device - their pixel value is transmitted to the computer. The more light is reflected (and a lot of it is when scanning a mirror), the brighter the scanned areas are.

The most popular keywords that are driven into the most used search engines are very often striking in their originality, since most people are looking for the answer to their rather strange questions on the Internet. Well, where else can you find them? From this article you will learn about what will happen if you scan a mirror.

There are quite a few options for the outcome of such a rather extraordinary experiment. So, as a result of the fact that a mirror has the property of reflecting light and an image, there is an opinion that if you scan a mirror, then as a result of this you can see the very mechanism of the device that produces the process. Another opinion: if you scan a mirror, then the result will be only which corresponds to the glow of the scanning lamp, or nothing at all.

A few more rather interesting opinions about what will happen if you scan a mirror;

In order not to guess, you can independently conduct a small experiment, which will give an exact answer to the question of what will happen if you scan the mirror. It does not take too much time and does not require any effort or special skills.

So, for the experiment, we need an ordinary mirror. The ideal option would be to use one that has the same dimensions as an A4 sheet of paper. Let's put it on the open scanner. If the mirror is attached to a wooden or any other base, then the cover cannot be closed. Then it remains only to scan your mirror and see the results.

After conducting such an experiment, you will be convinced that the result is not a white light or a scanning mechanism, but simply a black sheet. If the mirror was dirty in some places, then light spots will be visible there.

What explains such a result?

Modern home scanners have the following principle of operation: a carriage moves along the entire working area along with a lamp that illuminates the object that is being scanned. Rays of light that are reflected are captured by a special charge-coupled device. The more light that is reflected, the more current the CCD creates and transmits the pixel value to the computer. The greater the value of a pixel, the greater the illumination will be.

Thus, the answer to the question of what will happen if you scan a mirror is quite simple - you get an ordinary black sheet.

What does a scanned mirror look like? CHIP has compiled for you a brief and visual information on the issue, so that at three in the morning you will read it and finally go to sleep with satisfaction.

So what will happen anyway?

Putting a mirror on the scanner and running the scan, the output will be a black mirror. Sounds weird, but looks weird.

Actually, the result will look something like this:

Round mirror scanned with a Canon scanner

As we can see, the final picture, to put it mildly, is not very similar to a mirror. Why it happens? In order to understand this, let's first find out how the scanner works.

Modern scanners use many different technologies, but they are built, by and large, according to the same design principle, which is shown in the picture below.

Here is how the scanner is roughly arranged from the inside:


Scanner Device Diagram

There is also an option with three mirrors:


Scanner with three mirrors

The number of mirrors is not particularly important to us, since scanning is performed according to the same general principle.

How is scanning done?

Using the first diagram from the previous section (two-mirror scanner), let's see how a document is scanned. The stages of the process are indicated on the diagram by numbers in purple circles.

When we place a document on the scanner and start scanning, something like this happens:

  1. A moving light source (1) shines through the document through the glass substrate. In the process of highlighting, the source sequentially passes along the entire document.
  2. The illuminated document is reflected in a moving mirror (2) that follows the light source at the same speed.
  3. Reflection from a moving mirror is picked up by a fixed mirror (3) mounted on the opposite side of the scanner.
  4. The image from the fixed mirror is read by a charge-coupled device (CCD or CCD) and transmitted to a computer (4). This is how we get and save a scanned copy of the document.

Charge-coupled device matrix - the most important microcircuit in the scanner

What happens if you scan a mirror?

Now let's replace the paper document in our scheme with a mirror and try to scan it.

Here is what will start happening inside the scanner if you do this:


Mirror scan
  1. In the mirror lying on the scanner will be reflected bottom of the scanner.
  2. The reflection of the lower part of the scanner body from the mirror will be highlighted and picked up by the moving mirror.
  3. Reflection from a moving mirror will be picked up by a fixed mirror.
  4. The CCD-matrix reads the image and transfers it to the computer.

Thus, by scanning the mirror, we get an image scanner bottom cover.

Depending on the color of the cover, the output image will be the same color, for example, blue, white, gray. In our example, we got a mysterious black mirror.

The scanner will also capture the shape of the mirror and possibly the scratches and dust on it. The result will be something like what we showed you at the beginning of the article.

Note from physicists

Modern scanners may also have optical focal elements that help to clearly capture the image of letters or lines on a sheet of paper.

Therefore, if you put a mirror on the scanner, the output image can also turn out to be quite blurry. This will happen because the focal optics will have nothing to focus on.

However, if there are scratches, dust particles, hairs on the mirror, the output will be a clear image of them against a blurred background of the color of the lower part of the scanner body.