High frame rate or high resolution?

It’s been pretty much a “given” in the machine vision world that you can have one or the other, but not both. CameraLink, and now GigE have gone some way to breaking that paradigm but the new Prosilica GX3300 camera from AVT well and truly shatters it.

This little beastie uses the 8 Megapixel Kodak KAI-08050 CCD sensor to deliver 17 frames per second via dual GigE ports. I find that nothing short of staggering. Now I can grab very high resolution color, images, and lots of them. And I assume, although I can find nothing about it on the AVT website, that if I use binning or acquire a reduced number of rows, I can bump the frame rate up to quite astounding levels.

Incidentally, I know many people will consider the fact that the Kodak KAI-08050 is a color sensor to be a negative in terms of the real resolution delivered. That’s true unless you’re using white light, but with so many pixels it strikes me that you could throw some away (all the red ones, for example, if you’re using green light) and still get a high resolution image.

Another minor negative is that the camera needs an F-mount lens. Well what do you expect with such a big sensor? You’ve got to accept a few compromises to get both high speed and high resolution.