Resolution up, prices down

It’s a familiar trend but the SP-20000 “Spark Series” from JAI adds another data point. This is a 20Mp camera (monochrome or color,) that spits out 30 full frames per second (each measuring 5,120 by 3,840,) and costs under $9,000. Yes it’s CMOS, which I know upsets some traditionalists, but the pixels are 6.4 microns and it takes an F-mount lens, so it’s photo-capturing credentials are good.

If you take the time to plow through the spec sheet you’ll see this is a pretty interesting camera. My interest of course is industrial inspection, but I can see this being used in many other applications, like surveillance and aerial mapping. Just not traffic.

Bayer filter versus three-chip

At the risk of turning this in to ColorMachineVision4Users I want to continue the Bayer versus three-chip camera comparison. Or rather, I want to let camera-maker JAI have the last word. This video, lifted from YouTube, provides an excellent summary and should appeal to those of you who don’t enjoy reading.
 

 

If you found that useful, may I suggest you look at some of the other camera videos on the JAI website. They’re informative and well-produced, and best of all, they’re not just promotional glitz.

New cameras at Automate

File this under “things to look for in a few months.”

Both JAI and SVS-Vistek spent some time telling about their new cameras. JAI have adopted a color – a jazzy metallic green – and have two new families on the way, the Spark and the Elite. If you know the JAI product line, you’ll realize that this represents a significant change in marketing approach: until now it was a case of “any color you like so long as…” well you know.

SVS-Vistek are also doing some interesting things, most notably their evo-Tracer which has a “Micro four thirds lens mount.” Translation: it’s a bayonet fitting that provides focus control. It looks really cool, but it’s not on their website. Check back later, I guess.

And last but not least, German camera-maker NET had a wireless smart/PC camera on their stand. Dubbed the Corsight, this is one of those PC-in-a-box products, but with wireless capability. I can imagine it being very useful in situations where I don’t want or can’t string an Ethernet cable through the plant. But it’s not on their website yet.

Final thought: it’s good to tease potential customers with next-generation products, but maybe a little more coordination between the webmaster and Marketing would be a good thing?

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.

Camera design/development jobs

In what I take as another sign of industry growth, I noticed that camera-maker JAI are hiring. They’re seeking a Software Engineer and a Project Engineer for their operation in San Jose, California. (I think that’s what used to be Pulnix, many years ago.)

San Jose is not the cheapest place in the world to live, although it has its compensations – San Francisco is a few miles north, the Pacific Coast just a little to the west, blue skies… As these are what might be described as “high-end” jobs requiring very specialized skills, I suspect the pay and benefits won’t be too shabby either.

On a broader note, these job openings would suggest that JAI have some development projects underway, and that in turn implies some confidence about future business. But, (like the Wall Street Journal, I have to follow every piece of good news with a negative twist,) we should remember that much, maybe even a majority, of JAI’s business is in traffic and security. Thus it would be unwise to assume that these new cameras (if that’s the development goal,) are intended for or predicated on the industrial machine vision market.

Still good news though.

What can multi-spectral imaging do for you?

I’ve long been fascinated by the 2-CCD cameras from JAI. I know they do a 3-CDD version too, and there’s an interesting application case study on the Vision & Sensors site (Jan 5^th, 2012,) but that’s aimed more at color applications. What I like about the 2-CCD model is that it combines visible and IR imaging through the same lens, for which I can see many possible applications. (Okay, full disclosure: I haven’t bought any of these because they’re somewhat expensive, but the concept is great.)

For those of you who struggle to see where you would use such a camera, JAI have placed a short movie on YouTube, but to save you time I’ve embedded it below.

What has always intrigued me though is that JAI seem to miss what I see as the biggest benefit of this camera concept: it allows the use of multiple lighting strategies at the same location on the production line.

For example, suppose I need both a darkfield image and a front-lit image of a part moving down a production line. I’m forced to have two separate stations with two cameras, and that takes up valuable floorspace. With an AD-080CL camera I need only one station, saving me precious space.

Now I shall sit back and wait for my royalties from JAI.

Imaging in the UV

I was forwarded an interesting email from JAI last week regarding the advantages of using shorter wavelengths of light. The message was that when trying to see really small features it can help to get down into the UV part of the spectrum. And guess what! JAI make cameras that are UV-sensitive!

Okay, please excuse my cynicism because this is a good point. It all boils down to the diffraction limit and the Rayleigh criterion. This little chart shows how wavelength has an influence on the resolving power of an optical system. Shorter wavelengths mean better ability to distinguish small details. And as we like to use red light at 660 nanometers, dropping down to say 350 nm can make a difference (assuming everything else in your system is perfect.)

If you follow the link to the JAI page for UV cameras, and go on to read the spec sheets – make sure to look at QE without glass or micro-lenses – you’ll see that the tradeoff for seeing in the shorter wavelengths is lower overall sensitivity. Your application will determine if this is an issue or not, but it may mean using high powered UV illumination, which brings up another concern: safety.

Longer wave UV light – UVA – is all around us, but that doesn’t make it good. The shorter wavelengths, as you get down to 300 nm and below, can start to get quite nasty: a suntan is the least of your problems! So if you head into the UV end of the spectrum, just exercise a little common sense regarding eye protection.

Resolutions still going up

It seems as though 8 megapixels is the new 5, if the latest product announcement from JAI is a sign of what’s to come. They’ve just launched a brace of new 8Mp cameras under the 800CL label, one monochrome and one color. These use the Kodak-08050 4 tap sensor to get as much as 17 frames per second.

Two points particularly of note:

1. JAI provide a link to Kodak’s specs for the sensor. It’s actually a 40 page book, so whatever your sensor question, you should find the answer in there somewhere.
2. The sensor might have 4 taps but JAI combine these and let you run with a single cable in base CameraLink mode. That should make connectivity less of a bugbear that it might have been.

I don’t have any information on pricing, but knowing that JAI pride themselves on quality, I doubt it’s much under $10k. But as Henry Royce (the engineer behind Rolls-Royce,) once said, “The quality remains long after the price is forgotten.”

The argument for prism-based color cameras

There are three options when it comes to color linescan: a form of Bayer filter over the sensor, the trilinear sensor (red, blue and green side-by-side,) or the prism. The Bayer is clearly a budget approach but how do you compare trilinear and prism?

Well you could take a look at an animated movie put together by Danish camera-maker JAI.  This shows the basic operating principles of each and summarizes the weaknesses of the trilinear method. It seems pretty logical to me, although it might be worth noting that JAI have spent a lot of money on a prism-sensor assembly process. (Their NIR-visible cameras are a clever use of the technology.) But perhaps they did that because the prism approach is more robust.

Agricultural machine vision keeps on growing

Time was, describing something as “agricultural” meant that it was rough and ready, perhaps even rather crude, but we all know machine vision is anything but. However, it’s role in agriculture seems to just keep on growing, as evidenced by “Machine Vision Saves Fruit, By Better Sizing And Sorting” (Control Engineering, October 5th, 2010.)

I thought this was a fascinating application case study, but what really caught my eye was the picture of the proprietary 2 sensor camera the equipment builder had integrated. This appears to be 2 CMOS sensors in a single housing, one viewing in the IR, the other using color. Perhaps you’re picturing something like the AD-080 from JAI, but no, that’s not what they’re using. What the picture shows is really two cameras, with two lenses, in a single box.

Now why wouldn’t they use the JAI camera for this?

Machine vision in the infra-red

I thought this was an interesting product announcement. Flir have been steadily building their presence in IR imaging, but historically they seem to have been aiming for the scientific, security, and maintenance markets. With the launch of the A615 – a VGA resolution GigE IR camera, they seem to be turning their attention to machine vision applications, particularly those in the food industry.

There are a couple of companies in the IR-MV space already – JAI and Sensors Unlimited – so this would seem to great a little more competition. That has to be a good thing, because one of the barriers to greater use of IR is price. Some of those cameras can be seriously expensive.

A 4-sensor line scan camera

I hear through the grapevine that JAI are launching a new color line scan camera. Unlike existing models of color line scan, which use either a bayer filter over the CCD or 3 sensors with individual color filters, this uses JAI’s prism technology. The major benefit is the superior color registration that results from a common optical path. This eliminates the alignment problems that make color line scan cameras such a pain to use.

Incidentally, the camera is available in only a 2k format, but the CCD sensors cover Red, Blue, Green and Near IR. This should make it useful for inspecting organic materials where IR can help uncover more data than is evident to the human eye. For an example of where this can be useful, take a look at this page on the JAI site about the similar multi-spectral AD-080 camera.

As for the LQ-200CL, which is what they’re calling this new camera, at the time of writing there are no details on the JAI site, but I’m sure that will change soon. Also absent is any pricing information. It won’t be cheap, but judging by the pricing of the AD-080 range I would expect this to be around $3,500.

Minnow or Shark?

Jørgen Andersen, CEO of camera-maker JAI, believes his company is destined to, “be one of the big fish,” of the machine vision world. (The quote comes from a profile piece in the Oct/Nov ’08 edition of “Imaging and machine vision Europe,” titled, “A true world player,”)

Now I’ve been predicting consolidation in the crowded field of machine vision camera manufacturers for some time, (go search my archives if you doubt me,) but is JAI destined to come out on top or might they be swallowed by a larger rival – perhaps Basler or AVT, to mention a couple of possibilities?

With annual revenues of almost $50M, JAI is clearly no minnow in the machine vision pond, but Andersen himself admits that in recent years they have stumbled. In retrospect, was the decision to shun Firewire® for CameraLink the right one for the business? Yes, CameraLink is technically superior, but as I’ve said so many times, people who buy machine vision hardware look at fitness for purpose, not how sexy the technology is.

And now that GigE is gaining traction, is the whole debate moot? Will JAI’s C3 Camera Suite turn their business around, allowing them to gobble up the smaller pond life?

Personally, I think JAI bring quality products to the marketplace, and I’d like to see them thrive, but it’s a tough world out there.