A sleeping (machine vision) giant?

Quick as you can, name me three machine vision companies.

Who did you come up with? Cognex probably, then who? Keyence? Dalsa? Well whoever was on
your list I’ll wager it didn’t include Panasonic.

If you are like me, you’re dimly aware that Panasonic make some low end, pixel counting vision sensors, but you probably didn’t see them as players at the PC end of the market. Well, thanks to INSPECT Online, who brought the Panasonic P400 product line to my attention, we can start to correct that misunderstanding.

Panasonic actually have a rather lengthy line up of vision products, but it’s the high end, PC-based, P400 and P400XD that really grabbed my attention. This seems to be a well-conceived product family designed to compete with the top of the line Keyence offerings. I haven’t got hands on with the P400 software yet, although there is a wealth of information on the web site, including a number of tutorials, so there’s no excuse for not learning more.

It seems to me then, that if you were looking to buy all your vision products from a single source, you should probably give Panasonic some serious consideration.