[Image-SIG] Help with ImageMagick-Python

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 02:30:47PM -0500, Bob Klimek wrote:
>>source).  That's why I wrote the SANE and PXC-200 modules, which are
>>PIL add-ons of a sort;
>
>I wasn't aware of these modules. So I'm not sure if I really need them, but 
>I'm curious. What do they do and where can I find them?

They're for grabbing data from an output device and returning a bitmap
as a PIL object.  A PXC-200 is a frame grabber, and SANE is a library
supporting various scanners, and, most interesting for our purposes,
the Polaroid Digital Microscope Camera.  It's actually pretty
impressive; using PIL and the PXC-200, a server program written in
Python can continuously grab frames from a microscope, JPEG-compress
them, and send them out at the rate of 21 frames/sec, which isn't too
far off the 24 or 30 frames/sec that would be ideal.

(The problem is that Java seems to take .4 sec to *de*compress a JPEG,
so our Java client is completely incapable of keeping up with a Python
server running at the rate.  We have a Python/Tkinter client, only
used for demos, that can keep up with that speed.  So much for Java
being "almost as fast as C++".)

--amk