Camera trends

The love-fest that is Vision 2012 is less than a month away and already vendors are giving us sneak-peeks at their latest and greatest. Some of the most intriguing come from camera-maker AVT who, besides some ho-hum range extensions, have an entirely new product, the Mako.

As I write this, the Mako page on the AVT website doesn’t have any content, so instead I will direct you their press release. Now this camera looks much like the reliable old Guppy, but whereas that was a FireWire camera, this will be offered with both GigE and USB3 interfaces.

I see that as highly significant. In fact I’d go so far as to say it means FireWire is on its death-bed, at least in the machine vision world. Some years back AVT saw how the wind was blowing when they snapped up Prosilica, thereby gaining a GigE product line up, and now they’re backing the new USB standard. I’d say that means the future is GigE and USB3, for everything except really large sensor formats and very high data rates.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone think we’ll see a linescan USB3 camera before the year end?