Two types of color camera?

If you’ve been struggling with a color camera, and are wondering why you don’t seem to be getting all the resolution you thought you’d paid for, have a look at “Customer Requirements Define 3CCD” in the January edition of Vision & Sensors magazine.

This well-written article provides a pretty good explanation of how a 3CCD camera works, and what it can do for you. “What’s wrong with Bayer filters?” you might be asking. “Why make it more complicated than it needs to be?”

The simple answer is that 3 CCD’s, each dedicated to a specific waveband, produces three images and therefore better quality. If you read my post “What can multi-spectral imaging do for you?” (January 18^th, 2012,) you may have followed the link to the website of camera maker JAI. And once you will probably have seen that they make color cameras with 3 CCD’s. Dalsa used to have a 3CCD color linescan camera, the Trillium, but that seems to have gone out of production, and the only other vendor I know of is Hitachi. Their website is rather big and awkward, so this 3CCD camera link will take you to the website of one of their distributors.