Phaer

Inspect: A modern industrial camera is not a monolithic block. It consists of components, which are also subject to further technical development. Which of these components are of particular interest to camera developers?

P. Dinev: Modern industrial cameras are improving every day - the applications and clients are becoming more demanding, and everybody is looking for more pixels, faster speed and more internal processing, so I think, all camera designers are trying to improve all these parameters, and to incorporate the latest components into their products. The three parameters are interconnected and they all are continuously improving. Modern cameras will not exist without the combined technological advances of all three parameters. It was only a couple of years ago, when the biggest CCD or CMOS imager commercially available had only 16 megapixels. Now, when we are offering 29 megapixel cameras, this is not enough for the most demanding applications (airborne, TFT, etc.).

Our clients are asking us for 50+ megapixel cameras. I am sure that several years from now, cameras with 80+ megapixels will be very common. It is the same with the camera's internal processing power - several years ago it was considered "state of the art" to put a 1 million gate FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) in the camera, now most of the cameras are using 3 or 4 million gate FPGAs. I strongly believe the rapid development of FPGA technology is playing a big role in the advances of modern industrial cameras. It allows for more internal processing, and thus offloading some of the image processing functions from the computer and placing them inside the camera. Interfacing multi-megapixel imaging sensors will not be possible without a modern FPGA. Of course, having all the megapixels and processing power will be useless if you cannot transmit the data.