Growing Sensor Sizes And Uncertainty In Pairing Lenses and Cameras
Lens and camera manufacturers need to collaborate to develop new mounting standards for the new, large sensor formats already on the market, as well as the ones that will be introduced.
Imaging sensors in the machine vision space have traditionally fit into cameras utilizing only a couple of different camera mounts, largely dominated by C-mount. However, newer sensors are beginning to grow far too large for C-mount to continue to allow resolutions to increase while maintaining high image quality. This has been addressed in industry by mounts like the TFL and TFL-II mount, but sensors have begun growing even beyond those sizes, where there are not any lens mounts with industrial standards. This has led to an interesting transitionary space, where camera companies are developing their own mounts, making it increasingly more difficult to match lenses to them, if lenses even exist that can cover their format sizes.
The drive towards higher resolutions has been a constant in the world of machine vision since its inception. Recent years have seen 9 and 12 megapixels (MP) systems, which were recently the high-resolution options in the market, have now passed on the baton to 120 MP, 150 MP, and 250 MP image sensors (Figure 1). These high-resolution sensors are not used in the majority of machine vision applications, but the whole industry is pulling upwards to higher resolutions. These increases are achieved through two different methods: shrinking pixel size or growing the overall sensor size.