Today I was able to sit down with one of my favourite artifacts in the UVic Libraries Special Collections: a cuneiform tablet that is roughly 4000 years old. We photographed it a few years ago using our TTI-Betterlight setup (overhead medium format camera lens with a scanback unit) so that it could be properly translated by a scholar at another institution.
Those images are still the sharpest and clearest representations of this small clay tablet — it is a little under 2 inches square:
Using the Creaform handheld 3D scanner, it took very little time to capture the full object. My first attempt was at 0.5 mm resolution. Two scans, top and bottom, took a little under 30 min including the merge, but it was clear that the resolution was not nearly fine enough. A second attempt at 0.3 mm provided a clearer image. I tried again at 0.2 mm but found that the image was ghosting (creating a slightly offset copy) too easily and the result was a muddied capture, so I finished editing the o.3 mm object and uploaded it.
You can see for yourself that the detail is not nearly as clear as in the photo above, but it does give you an idea of how the object looks in the whole: