Allied Vision Technologies (AVT) has released a range of GigE cameras, the Prosilica GX-Series, combining high-speed (running at 240Mb/s) and high-resolution.
To achieve a rate of 240Mb/s the GX-Series use Link aggregation (LAG), or IEEE 802.3ad, a networking technology that uses multiple Ethernet ports in parallel to increase the link speed beyond the limits of any one single port. In the case of the GX-Series, when the camera is connected by two cables to the host computer, the host computer only sees it as one connection at twice the normal speed (240Mb/s). A single cable can also be used, operating at 120Mb/s. The camera series operates with standard CAT-5e Ethernet cables.
The GX-Series introduces two new features: video auto-iris control and three-axis motorised lens control. The latter feature is integrated into the GX camera hardware to control lens focus, iris and zoom directly and remotely via the AVT/Prosilica GigE SDK without the use of an external control box.
The GX-Series also include all the features of the Prosilica GE-Series cameras including external trigger and sync I/O, RS232 peripheral port, advanced binning modes, offset controls, non-volatile configuration memory, and more. The AVT /Prosilica GigE Sample Viewer and the customer-acclaimed SDK are both available free of charge. The cameras are plug-and-play compatible with software from Matrox, National Instruments, Cognex, Stemmer Imaging, Tordivel, Norpix, MVTec, A&B Software and others.
Four models are currently available, the fast Megapixel GX1050 (120fps), the 2 Megapixel 2/3-inch optical format GX1660 (60fps), the 2 Megapixel HD resolution GX1910 (60fps) and the 8 Megapixel GX3300 (15 fps). A 4 Megapixel model will be released in 2010.
All GX-Series models feature high performance progressive scan Kodak KAI CCD sensors. The 14 bit A-D provides high quality images to meet the most demanding applications such as machine vision, high-speed industrial inspection, avionics, and traffic monitoring among others.
Available in either monochrome or colour models, the GX-Series are fitted with a C-mount with adjustable back-focus and provide uncompressed digital output in Mono8, Mono16, Bayer8, Bayer16, RGB24, YUV411, YUV422, YUV444, BGR24, RGBA24 and BGRA24 image formats.
