why is my point and shoot making batter captures than a DSLR

[morganW]

WOOT! I think I finally have the fidelity I am looking for!!!! So, I invested in a set of Smith and Victor lights (1200 watts of tungsten). I got em cheap for like 60 bucks but what a difference.! I used 150 pics at 24 mega pixel, ISO 100 and F10, and 10 pics of those were focus stacked. I also used a turntable with a black velvet backdrop. The render time was horrendous, over 60 hours! But thats OK, now I need to get busy and start creating my scan library. Thanks for all the help guys, it has been a journey. I have been photographing this object incessantly for two months in all kinds of different settings.

[ozbigben]

Good to see your persistence paid off. At least now you have some invaluable knowledge of what doesn't work and why which in the long run can be more useful than if things work the first time. 

[morganW]

LOL, yes, I made every mistake! I also learned a lot about photography in general along the way too...

[Marcel]

Congrats, I am happy you managed to get good results.

60 hours sounds really long for an 80 image scan, which GPU and CPU are you using? You'll be doing one scan a week this way

[morganW]

Hi Marcel, it was about 60 hours to complete the scan, I used over 150 images (maybe overkill?) and my set up is an I7 3.04 with a 460 GTX and 8 gigs of RAM,...any thoughts on how to reduce time to render is very much appreciated!

[David Cockey]

What settings did you use for Build Dense Cloud and Build Mesh?  60 hours with 150 photos sounds like the memory filled and swapped with the hard drive. If so one possible fix may be to increase memory size. Another fix is to split the project into smaller chunks after Align Photos.

[morganW]

I had the dense cloud set to "high" and the model was built at about 3 million faces. But, the model built in an hour, it was the dense cloud that ate all the time. Also, the chunk had about 131K points after aligning cameras...

[David Cockey]

Which operating system are you using?

131K points in the sparse cloud with 150 photos is reasonable.

A diagnostics run:

Copy the .psz file with a different name.

Start Task Manager and click on the Performance tab. How much memory is used without PhotoScan running?

Start PhotoScan and open the copy of the .psz file for the model. How much memory is used with PhotoScan open but not executing any commands?

Start to Build Dense Cloud.

Observe memory usage as shown in Task Manager. Let PhotoScan run until memory usage has leveled off. If it reaches 100% PhotoScan will start swapping data with the hard drive which makes PhotoScan run extremely slowly.