IDS has introduced a family of compact USB 3.0 industrial cameras with advanced colour processing capabilities. Three different sensors are available for the new USB 3.0 uEye cameras, ranging from VGA to 5 Megapixel with additional sensors to follow.
Measuring a mere 29 x 29 x 29mm, the USB 3.0 uEye CP cameras feature a housing that is not only small, but due to its magnesium casing is also lightweight and exceptionally robust to withstand the rigors of manufacturing settings.
USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed USB interface delivers significant advantages compared to the most common interfaces in the machine vision area, including a possible ten-fold increase in data rate of up to 400MB/s compared to USB 2.0's 40MB/s, or 100MB/s for GigE. The USB 3.0 interface also achieves simple and easy implementation and operation, especially in multi-camera industrial systems. Another advantage is that USB 3.0 is backwards compatibility allowing for the continued use of existing USB 2.0 systems.
The USB 3.0 uEye CP camera series is perfectly suited for a wide variety of vision applications, including industrial, medical and biometrics. It offers trigger, flash and pulse width modulation, as well as two GPIOs (General Purpose I/O) which can be changed into a serial interface (RS232) so that peripheral devices can be triggered or controlled. In addition, thanks to their micro USB 3.0 connector and the available fittings, the cameras are also excellent for harsh industrial environments.
The cameras boast brightness correction realised by a 12-bit lookup table and hardware gamma. When compared to standard 8-bit, the 12-bit colour depth offers 16 times the level of detail.
The camera family has an FPGA that does de-bayering with up to 12 bit per channel and allows the camera to output RGB or YUV data, thus taking load off the CPU. It also does colour correction and thus renders true-to-life colour quality.
To simplify deployment of the camera family, IDS offers a software package for Microsoft Windows and Linux that includes 32/64-bit drivers, demo programs, and source code in C++, C# and Visual Basic. As a result, mixed operation of IDS USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and GigE cameras is easily achieved.