Please Note: This blog post is part of a series of five posts altogether.
The posts include: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Step 2: Selecting A Lens

To adjust the focal lengths for the above examples, zoom lenses would be necessary. These lenses, however, have considerable disadvantages (weight, size, price, etc.). Therefore, usually fixed focus lenses are used. To take advantage of quality offered by The Imaging Source cameras, we recommend the use of Pentax and Computar MegaPixel series lenses (see table below).

To represent the object completely on the CCD chip we select a lens whose focal length is lower than the calculated one. That means for our above examples:

• Barcode recognition: C2514-M(KP)
• Fruit sorting: C1614-M(KP)
• Eye inspection: C3516-M(KP)
• Number plate recognition: C5028-M(KP)

Please note: The lenses format has to be larger than or equal to the CCD chip's format.

To be continued...