More than one way to do the (inspection) job

Whenever I look at someone else’s machine vision implementation I find myself thinking how I’d have done the job. Inevitably, I see that a different camera might have offered advantages, or perhaps a lens seems too user-accessible. In most cases though, design decisions were taken for sound reasons, often that had little to do with the elegance of the solution.

To illustrate this let’s take a look at two competing inspection products. These are the Bizerba BVS and the recently announced Mettler-Toledo V6300 Series. Both are intended for package inspection in the food and beverage industries, and they show some interesting differences in philosophy.

Both have the product fed on conveyors, use touchscreens and are designed to be easily reconfigured for different packages, but the camera technology is different. While Bizerba go with a linescan approach Mettler-Toledo use multiple matrix cameras.

Which is the right approach? That’s hard to say. I suspect Bizerba’s linescan systems are more robust than those from Mettler, and definitely easier to configure. On the other hand, the Mettler system seems less expensive.

As a buyer, how would I choose between them? By testing. Lot’s and lots of testing. And customer references, if I could get them.

As I said above, there’s always more than one way.