The Guppy gets bigger

The Guppy is the diminutive Firewire camera from AVT of Germany, and when I say it gets bigger I am in fact referring to the size of the images it can acquire. Allied Vision Technology have managed to squeeze a 5Mp CMOS sensor into a package measuring just 48 x 30 x 30 mm in size while still retaining a C-mount lens format.

What this means of course is that the individual pixels are really, really small. In fact they come in at just 2.2 microns square. Now smaller pixels don’t capture as many photons; in other words their light sensitivity is lower, but there is also good news. Smaller pixels mean better resolution in terms of line pairs per millimeter that can be imaged. So if you need to make very precise measurements, this camera might be worth considering.