Scanning your way to Hi-res photos

I think we have all at one time or another scanned a picture, negative or slide to digitize a picture. Recently I had access to some old family pictures and had no scanner around to capture them, so I laid them out on the table and used my 6MP digital camera to digitize them...they turned out pretty good :).
This post though is about an aritcle I read the other night on using the flatbed scanner for macro photography! I was skeptical at first until I saw some of the images. http://www.photogalaxy.com/articles/materials/scan/2005-10-16-SCN-01-38.jpg
Basically the concept is that you place the object you want to 'take a picture' of on the bed of the scanner. If you want a black background turn off all the lights in the room and scan away and the result is a high quality picture of the object (http://www.photocritic.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/268361_11025_5ab50e5ae5_p.jpg)
I have to climb up in the attic and dust off the scanner that I thought lost it's usefullness some time back and see what images I can create with it. I will keep you posted on when and if I make that trip into the attic to retrieve one of my archived computer items. I think it is next to the AMD 586/133 desktop with16 MB of ram :)