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[Holger Dell]

hi,

we just want to build a prototype for a science project and we need a
good digital camera for this reason.
we put the camera in a distance of one meter to the object, we want to
take a picture of (it is a laser point, so not very huge).

my questions:
(1) which specifications should the camera have, so that we have the
laser point in an acceptable size in the picture (we need about 300x300
pixels per 1cmx1cm on the object that is placed in a distance of one meter)?
(2) is there a possibility to control the camera directly via usb or
firewire? (especially i'd like to write a program in c++ that takes the
photo automatically and then immediately starts to compute whatever we
want to compute out of the token picture)

thanks,
holger