While advances in sensor technology have opened new applications for machine vision, the ability of a lens to interface with these sensors has lagged behind.
In the past, most machine-vision sensors were typically smaller than a 12-mm image circle, with line sensors less than 2000 pixels and area sensors with 4 Mpixels or fewer. Recently both line and area sensors have rapidly increased in size from 20 up to 90 mm, while pixel count has increased up to 12,000 pixels for linescan cameras and up to 16 Mpixels for area-array cameras.
