A brand-new, ultra-powerful smart camera is about to hit the market to help businesses in a wide range of industries streamline their operations.

The benefits of smart cameras have made them an ideal match for a manufacturing environment. Combining a camera, processor, software and communications in one small, low-power package, smart cameras are highly integrated optical inspection tools for controlling quality and increasing productivity—required tasks in manufacturing.

Smart cameras have emerged as simpler alternatives to PC-based machine vision systems, and currently represent the largest and fastest growing segment of the vision market. This shift is based primarily on the evolution of CMOS imagers and digital media processing chips.

ARM-based Z series Smart Cameras from Vision Components are now available with user-friendly standard software for all machine vision applications

If you’re interested in self-driving cars, drones or robotics, then you will understand why machine vision continues to grow.

Teledyne DALSA announced its next generation BOA2 Smart Camera featuring higher resolution imaging, dual-core processing and embedded iNspect Express application software.

Whether an automated machine vision system measures a spark plug’s gap, locates an assembly line item, reads 2D code, counts parts, checks for flaws or performs a host of other tasks, it is running at a greater speed and higher resolution than ever before.

Automatic inspection by machine vision is leading to the dawn of the “smart factory,” eliminating errors resulting from human manual operations, improving quality consistency, increasing productivity, reducing production costs, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Over the past several years, there have been some common threads among many of the companies that develop vision sensors and cameras.