DALSA publishes an article "Image Sensor Basics: Changes in the marketplace mean benefits for customers" in Quality Magazine. Few quotes:
"Major industry players—such as ON Semiconductor, CMOSIS, e2v, and Sony — have grown even larger as they’ve acquired smaller challengers, yet they continue to compete to strengthen their hold on existing markets and their competitive position with new customers as the demand for devices that rely on image sensors expands.
For end customers, industry consolidation means the promise of innovation leading to new, higher-quality sensors that deliver greater features and functionality, and are available at a lower cost.
The image sensor industry holds a vast repository of intellectual property and consolidation among former competitors will result in the integration of this intellectual property and the sharing of best practices, which in turn, should facilitate improved image sensor quality. In fact, CMOS image sensor quality has already improved in recent years.
The cost of image sensors and the price of the cameras or other products in which they’re incorporated will continue to decrease as the remaining competitors jockey for expanded market share, and consumers will be the beneficiaries."
Is that's Dalsa's excuse for illegally exporting technology to China?
ReplyDeleteIts interesting to read such a statement from an industrial camera manufacturer. Because from a customers point of view consolidation is "the number one thing" thats missing in industrial camera market. There is a huge number of pretty small camera companies that - well... basically add their proprietary housing and power supply to a cmos image sensor and some proprietary goodies (software) to lock you in if you are an OEM customer (a strategy that surprisingly works out throughout the industrial electronics market, not just industrial cameras). Its interesting to see what price this companies still are able to get. An example - we are a machine building company in a robotic application, we need industrial cameras. We have a small electronics department (for a lot of other things, not just cameras) and develop "our own industrial cameras". We dont sell them, we just add housing, power supply, communication to CMOS sensors of our choice to get the camera we need. And yes - still in 2016 you can compete on price with the industrial camera suppliers (we require maybe 1000 cameras per year). And even more, you have additional benefits - you can adapt the cameras exactly to what you need if you want to do that. You dont need that much effort and knowledge - you can buy IP-cores, there are reference designs, cmos sensor families where the members are quite compatible and EMS comapnies that solder, assemble and test the cameras. It will be interesting to see if this changes as the industrial vision market grows - from my point of view the price point of industrial cameras is far too high at the moment. (One funny thing is - in one of the projects we replaced Dalsa cameras with our own design).
ReplyDelete--Thomas