Q+A CENTER
Latest question:
How do you think the new GigE standards will influence the machine vision industry?
Respond or ask your question now!
Advanced Imaging Magazine
Most Read
Most E-mailed
Print Article
Lighting and Illumination Products
Product Update
Lighting and Illumination Products
by Rich Handley
November 2002
An essential part of any machine vision application is its lighting/illumination component. Approaches range from positioning a light in back of an object to create a silhouette, to placing it on the side for a shadow effect, to full head-on illumination from the front. Included among the options are backlights, light pipes, darkfield illuminators, small fiber lights, light lines, ring lights, axial lighting, collimated lights, fluorescent lighting, lasers, LEDs, halogen lamps, and many others-a wide range of lighting techniques exist, offering great flexibility to the user. Which solution is best, obviously, depends on the application.
For more information on how illumination impacts machine vision, visit our online Machine Vision Professional (MVP) feature at www.advancedimagingmag.com/mvp/ and take the quiz there to qualify yourself as an MVP. In the meantime, take a gander at the following illumination-based products, which you just might find quite enlightening.
First up is Advanced Illumination, a company based in Rochester, VT, whose BL5420 Backlight is designed to offer illumination for small objects where significant magnification is required for inspection. Solid-state illumination provides calibration-free operation. The backlight can be configured to provide enough lighting to saturate a Pulnix camera with a 16mm lens when operated at f/16, with a 10 microsecond pulse width and an illuminated diameter of 4 millimeters. Utilizing Evenlite® technology, the BL5420 can be configured for customer-supplied power in either 12 or 24 volts.
— Indicate 201 under November 02
HLV
series LED spotlights from CCS America (Waltham, MA) are designed to replace and supplant halogen lights, particularly
for area scan, line scan, 2D code-reading and micro-precision
markets. According to the manufacturer, the HLV series combines
the advantages of LED lighting with the intensity of halogen
fiber lighting (300,000 lux), opening new markets for LED
lighting. Features include a life span of over 30,000 + hours,
selectable wavelengths allowing customer to take advantage
of spectral sensitivities, lower operating cost and lower
maintenance. — Indicate 202 under November 02
New
Jersey-based Edmund Industrial Optics now carries motorized versions of Infinity Photo-Optical's video lens line. The Infinity KV and Infinivar CFM motorized models reportedly offer the same optical performance as their manual counterparts but include an analog control unit and power supply. The control unit allows users to vary both focus and focus speed. Depending on the objective lens chosen, the Infinity KV can have a working distance up to 2m, or a field-of-view as small as 0.8mm in diameter. The lens is designed for machine vision and laboratory applications that require high magnification at long distances. The Infinivar CFM microscope video lens is continuously focusable down to a 0.8mm field-of-view at a working distance of 9mm.
This lens also offers magnifications as high as 330X.
