JAI has launched a completely new series of industrial monochrome line scan cameras under the family name Sweep. The new cameras combine high scan rates with extra-large high sensitivity pixels requiring less scene light than conventional line scan cameras to produce quality images. The first two models in the new Sweep Series (SW-2000M-CL-80 and SW-2000M-CL-65) both feature 2048 pixel resolution, 20 µm x 20 µm large pixels, and deliver scans rates up to 80,000 lines/second (80 kHz model) and 65,000 lines/second, respectively.
The Sweep SW-2000M is the only line scan camera currently on the market offering 20 µm x 20 µm large pixels. This provides a range of advantages to vision system designers.
With a 400 µm² photon collection area and a large quantum well capacity, these new line scan cameras provide an excellent signal/noise ratio, maximizing the image quality even in line scan applications where providing enough scene light is difficult due to the physical constraints or limitations in light budget.
The high sensitivity pixels make the Sweep SW-2000M capable of capturing an acceptable exposure at 4 times the speed of a camera with only 10-micron pixels, providing system integrators an opportunity to scale down their investment in expensive lighting solutions.
Large pixels provide further advantages by lowering the “Modulation Transfer Function (MTF)” requirements of the camera lens, which means that Sweep SW-2000M has a higher tolerance to “lens blur” making it less dependent on high quality lenses to obtain the required image quality.
The cameras are equipped with an Ethernet port for remote control, firmware updates and download of user software and documents. It also has a “scalable resolution function” making it possible to set the camera to any resolution below 2048 pixels.
The image sensor can be set in two operating modes – a higher dynamic range mode and a responsive mode. In the higher dynamic range mode the quantum well can contain as many as 360k electrons delivering images with high signal/noise levels. In vision inspection situations where the scene light is limited the camera can be switched to “responsive mode” (collecting 60k electrons). In the responsive mode the sensor’s quantum well fills up faster, providing a higher response on the grey scale. The resulting images have greater brightness and better contrast.
The first models in the Sweep Series are equipped with a single-channel Camera Link interface (Base Configuration) and can output 8/10/12 bits per pixel in single, dual, or triple data formats.
