For a hundred years the dental radiograph has been an average — a blur of charge summed across an exposure. The photon-counting detector refuses to average. It counts each X-ray individually, and in doing so quietly rewrites what a diagnostic image can be....
A dental radiograph looks like a photograph, but it is really a measurement — a shadow cast by an X-ray beam onto a flat receptor. Whether that shadow reports a root's true length or a convincing lie depends almost entirely on geometry, and on the...
At the magnifications clinical photography demands, sharpness is not a plane but a sliver — often shallower than a single tooth is deep. Everything that makes a dental image trustworthy begins with a decision about the aperture, and everything the aperture cannot solve, focus stacking...
On the monitor a digital impression is seductive: clean, colour, rotatable, apparently perfect. But a scan that looks perfect and a scan that is accurate are not the same claim, and the gap between them is where restorations quietly fail....
A handheld X-ray unit is a beautiful piece of engineering, and it puts the source of the beam in the operator's own hand. The image it makes is identical to the wall-mounted tube's. The dose it delivers to the person holding it is not....