Name the areascan imaging task. Give the field of view the camera needs to cover, the smallest feature you need to resolve, how many pixels you want spanning that feature at the part, and the dimensional tolerance you have to hold. The wizard uses these to solve required magnification, pin object-space pixel size, and Nyquist-check candidates — and to score every candidate areascan camera in the shortlist. (For linescan stations, see W4 Linescan Setup — linescan camera selection coordinates with the transport and encoder as a unit.)
Describe the motion. Give the throughput frame rate the inspection runs at, the speed your part is moving past the camera (set 0 for a static part), and the maximum motion blur — in pixels — you'll tolerate at the sensor. The wizard chains M1 (Motion Blur) against the candidate camera's exposure budget and surfaces M2 (Rolling Shutter Flash Duration) when a rolling-shutter candidate is in scope.
Answer the discriminator questions. The shutter answer routes your candidates against motion-fit (rolling-shutter candidates inherit M2's flash-duration caveat); interface picks the bandwidth headroom band; sensor format and pixel-pitch combine to set image-circle demand and resolution-at-the-part. Color, shutter, interface, sensor format, and budget all narrow the catalog before ranking.
The wizard has narrowed the areascan-camera catalog to candidates that survived your task, motion, and preference constraints. Review the list — uncheck any candidate you'd rather skip — then move to ranking. Each card carries the shutter type the candidate carries: global shutter candidates earn the canonical motion-fit recipe; rolling shutter candidates carry the M2 (Rolling Shutter Flash Duration) caveat against your part-speed input.
| # | Camera | Shutter type | Constraints | Score |
|---|
How this is calculated
What areascan camera picking covers.
Picking a camera is a chain of decisions about what each pixel has to see. The wizard walks the chain in order: what you're imaging, how many pixels per feature you need, what the math demands of the sensor, which preferences narrow the field — color or mono, global or rolling shutter, which interface, what budget — and which cameras in the catalog actually meet the constraint stack. Pair W2 with W1 when you've picked the camera and need to commit to a lens. Pair W2 with W4 when the inspection runs linescan rather than areascan. Pair W2 with M2 when you're considering rolling-shutter candidates against a moving part.
You start by naming the imaging task — feature size, required pixels per feature, field of view, frame rate. The wizard runs the sensor math: object-space pixel size pins required pixel pitch against magnification, required magnification pins sensor dimension against the field of view, and a Nyquist sanity check guards against under-resolved features. From there it asks the discriminator questions: color or monochrome, global or rolling shutter, which interface (USB3 / GigE / 10GigE / CoaXPress), preferred sensor format, and budget tier. Each answer narrows the catalog.
The output is a ranked shortlist of candidate cameras with per-camera fit explanations — what each candidate gets right, what it costs in tradeoff, and why the wizard ranked it where it did. Sensor format and pixel pitch combine to set FOV-at-magnification and pixel-density-at-the-part; shutter type combines with the part's motion to flag rolling-shutter risk; interface combines with required data rate to surface bandwidth headroom or shortfall. You leave with a deep link to the catalog page for each candidate and the option to drop the recommendation into a full station plan, where Lens Picker takes over for the optics half of the system. For linescan stations, picking the camera and coordinating the station happens together in Linescan Setup (W4); this wizard is the areascan camera picker.