The most suitable technology to freeze your images

The camera is an optoelectronic device capable of producing two-dimensional image of the framed scene. The cameras used today in the industrial environment are constituted by a solid-state sensor, that is mediated with a silicon chip.

The most popular technologies are those of the CCD (Charge-Couple Devices) and CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor).

  • The CCD technology still offers better image quality and continues to be widely used in the industry when it requires a high signal / noise ratio.
  • The CMOS technology is cheaper and can provide very high resolution sensors at an affordable cost.

The two technologies remain complementary, and the choice of one or the other depends on the application and components availability on the market. In fact there are cameras with CMOS sensors, with high-performance and higher cost than CCD cameras with mediocre performance.

The sensor is constituted by a set of photosensitive elements (called pixels) capable of transforming the incident light into an electrical signal. In the most common configuration the pixels are arranged in a rectangular array whose size can vary from a few millimeters to over 35mm of diagonal.