Lenses for high resolution sensors

It cannot have escaped your notice that camera resolutions are going up. No so long ago it seemed like 2Mp was going to be the standard in a C-mount housing but now 5Mp cameras are everywhere (though not in smart cameras - yet. )

There is however a problem with this newfound abundance of pixels: they need very good quality lenses to take advantage of the sensor resolution, otherwise the vision system ends up being optically constrained.

I’ve covered the reasons for this in previous posts – a search on MTF should give you all the background – so today I want to highlight one lens manufacturer that’s scrambling to keep up with the trend.

This is Kowa, who make a wide range of C-mount lenses for machine vision, including the just-launched JC10M range. Advertised as a 10 megapixel lens, (but curiously, not yet on their web site,) they claim resolution of 200lp/mm at the image center, dropping to 160lp/mm in the corners. These are good numbers, (although I’d still rather see the MTF graphs,) as they should be for a lens costing nearly $1,000.

Yes, it’s an expensive lens, but when the application demands high resolution why would you compromise performance by using something cheap?

And if you want to read more about this lens, check out machine vision components vendor, Industrial Vision Components.