hi,

we just want to build a prototype for a science project and we need a 
good digital camera for this reason.
we put the camera in a distance of one meter to the object, we want to 
take a picture of (it is a laser point, so not very huge).

my questions:
(1) which specifications should the camera have, so that we have the 
laser point in an acceptable size in the picture (we need about 300x300 
pixels per 1cmx1cm on the object that is placed in a distance of one meter)?
(2) is there a possibility to control the camera directly via usb or 
firewire? (especially i'd like to write a program in c++ that takes the 
photo automatically and then immediately starts to compute whatever we 
want to compute out of the token picture)

thanks,
holger