Zapdos is a legendary Pokémon based on the Native American legend of the thunderbird. The thunderbird was known for being the spirit of thunder, lightning, and rain in the form of a giant bird.
One of the original legendaries from the first generation of Pokémon, Zapdos is a cult favourite in the Pocket Monsters Community. In the trading card game, Zapdos was once in the top 10 of the ultimate cards for kids to trade for in the playground in the 90s.
Our Zapdos Origin Story
When looking for cards to scan to test CT scanning capabilities in the early days of PACK SCAN, our co-founders looked through their childhood Pokémon card collections for the ideal card. They came to the conclusion to scan a Magnemite card as it most closely represented the philosophy of electricity and technology at the heart of CT scanning. But, neither having a Holo Magnemite, nor a Magneton, they looked for another electric type Pokémon to test. With a little bit of egotism, they then chose Zapdos as symbolic of PACK SCAN, combining the image of electricity with the power of an eternal God. Also, because it was the only Gen 1 Holo they had at the time...
So with a Zapdos card and a CT scanner, PACK SCAN first started experimenting to see if it was possible to CT scan trading cards. To get the process right the team had to work out the correct energy, current, power, exposure, gain, projection count and frames per projection to run the scan at with billions upon billions of possible combinations. A challenge had begun.
Obtaining our First Successful Scan
Anyone out there who thinks finding the correct parameters to CT scan a Pokemon card is easy, we at PACK SCAN can inform you with our own experience, it is not. It took a painstaking amount of work to figure out how to optimise the x-rays to detect foil on cardboard, and even more work to then get any intelligible shapes. No CT software is designed to be doing this, it is all developed for medical and industrial applications with no overlap. To get a device designed to penetrate the densest of metals with high power to find ink thin markings on paper was almost like finding a needle in a haystack. But we persevered.
After what felt like forever, there was a day, a day when it began to make sense. A member of our team was testing the limits of a function on VG Studios visualisation software when they noticed a spiky shape that looked like vampire fangs. On closer inspection it was the wings of Zapdos! After an evening of celebrating the team went back to work, and began developing the image. Our very first successful scan. You can see the original scan in the image below, with Zapdos in the centre. The wing details can be seen on the right edge of the triangular black void in the centre-left of the card.
Developing our Success
Since our first Trading Card scan, we have only got better at detecting details on trading cards. The PACK SCAN team has developed a Unique Foil Detection (UFD) process that allows for optimal feature detection. This UFD process is a guarded secret currently as our team is collaborating with others to make this automated and seamless for future generations. But the results you can see, such as this Zapdos card you can see below which was scanned 6x faster and was detected with 120 seconds of the scan being uploaded. This card was hidden within a sealed Fossil Set booster pack from 1999 that we scanned only two days ago.
We continue to improve our trading card scanning service and hope in the near future to get even better results than this as our team develops our understanding of ink recognition and feature detection automation with UFD. Subscibe to our mailing list on pack-scan.com for future updates.
