If you need edge-to-edge sharpness, however, your best bet will be to invest in the best lenses you can afford (a good idea anyway).

GenICamCamera

The second is the quality of the materials that make up the lens. Poor quality materials are a major factor and they’re why we often “get what we pay for” when we buy glass.

GenICam (Generic Interface for Cameras) is an international standard that provides a generic programming interface for all kinds of cameras regardless of the interface technology (CoaXPress, GigE Vision, Camera Link, USB3 Vision, etc.) [Source: EMVA ].

Teledyne Adimec is an ISO 9001:2015 certified medium- sized company that designs and produces reliable industrial cameras in small batches to meet customer demands at global OEMs. We serve three strategic markets. – Machine Vision, Healthcare and Global Security.

Lenses with a higher refractive index tend to have less chromatic aberration than lower index glass, but it’s present in all spherical lenses to some extent.

Chromatic aberration is similar to spherical aberration in that it results from the way light gets refracted through a spherical lens.

The result is an image with rainbow effects or, more often, colored fringes of light (usually either magenta or green) where there should instead be sharp boundaries.

The good news is that chromatic aberration can often be fixed in post-processing. Any software that applies lens corrections will do the trick.

If these two options are out of your budget, there’s one more option: stopping down. It doesn’t often have to be by much. Sometimes stopping down by just a third or two of a stop can have a dramatic increase in sharpness.

The irony is that most lenses come with some form of spherical aberration correction, and it’s often this attempt at correction that can cause the magenta tinges in the foreground and green tinges in the background in out-of-focus areas.

Genicamapp

Peripheral rays can come out either being bent too much (positive spherical aberration) or not enough (negative spherical aberration).

GenICamBrowser

Maybe you’re a landscape photographer and love shooting with wide angles, but the images tend to come out soft, especially in the corners?

When compared with machine vision interface standards, the GenICam standard seems more abstract. With Camera Link, such a standard was not as important as frame grabbers and frame grabber software were heavily relied upon.  With more machine vision interface standards allowing a direct connection to the computer, such as GigE Vision and USB3 Vision, this standard has become more important.  Also, as cameras include more and more features, GenICam is relied upon even with interfaces that require a frame grabber, such as CoaXPress.

Another option is to invest in a gradient-index lens. Gradient-index lenses remove spherical aberration issues by increasing their refractive index at their center and gradually decreasing it as it moves out towards the edge of the lens.

When all the light converges in a single point, images come out fully sharp from the center to the corners. Unfortunately, since most of our lenses are spherical, there’s almost always going to be some rays that don’t converge at the intended focal point.

What is spherical aberration, why does it happen, and how can you avoid it? Find out all you need to know right here in this guide!

The goal is to have a plug and play, smooth interfacing experience for the user.  While this means easier switching of suppliers or second sourcing options, this is meeting the demands of the customers and enabling new applications.  Further standardization is another indication of the maturing of the machine vision market.

GenICamPython

What we want from lenses, however, is for all the light rays to come together at a single focal point, like in the image below:

GenICamdownload

As a result, light rays hitting the lens at different spots will end up hitting at different places along the optical axis, never quite converging.

Using GenICam, all of the software on the PC can directly connect to the camera and can say set the value of exposure time without knowing the brand of the camera or how the feature is implemented in the camera firmware.

With CoaXPress, the GenICam standard allows for a direct connection between the software layer and the camera.  This means the system designer can use any CoaXPress camera and frame grabber and have a standardized programming interface.  They can take advantage of standard machine vision software such as HALCON from MVTec, which allows the system designers to focus their effort on the machine vision application such as measurement, identification or 3D vision, and not on the operation of the camera.

In general, GenICam is a common API (application programming interface) for application software to speak to the camera independent of the standard of the interface.  Just as when you want to process an image in Photoshop, the scanned image can be from any scanner and it does not matter what the brand of the scanner is or how the scanner is connected to the computer.

GenICamC++

The third is how the lens elements are placed inside the housing. If these are even a little off, light rays hitting different parts of the lens will fail to all converge at the focal point.

For instance, if you have a 50mm f/1.8 lens and you get muddy edges while shooting wide open, reduce your aperture to f/2 or f/2.2 and you’ll probably notice a considerable increase in edge sharpness.

Light rays that pass through near the horizontal axis will refract less than rays that pass closer to the edge of the lens (peripheral rays).

GenICaminterface

That being said, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem. If your subject is in the center of the photo, slightly blurry edges won’t really matter. This is especially true of portraits and macro photography, where you’ll most likely be using a shallow depth of field for an out-of-focus background anyway.

Also, it may seem that standardization makes everything the same and removes competitive advantage, but standards like GenICam ensure that the camera can have special features without complicating the user’s experience.

GenICamsoftware

Obviously buying higher quality lenses will reduce the number of issues in general, and you can avoid spherical aberrations entirely if you can afford an aspherical lens.

Usnea Lebendig is an experienced photographer and reviewer who loves to photograph professionally and in moments where the world’s beauty and/or strangeness leaps in front of the lens.

Each lens has what’s called a refractive index (its ability to bend light). This refractive index will often vary with different wavelengths, causing each color wavelength to be bent at a slightly different angle.

Most camera lenses have spherical surfaces, as they’re easier to manufacture. Spherical surfaces aren’t issue-free, though.

It’s a bit different in the sense that where spherical aberration occurs when a lens can’t focus a single color of light, chromatic aberration occurs when a lens can’t focus the various colors (wavelengths) at a single point.

The first is lens design. The lens curvature affects its performance. In general, spherical aberrations occur more with shorter focal length lenses than longer ones.

This issue happens when the light rays passing through fail to come together at a single focal point. The light rays that strike the edges of the lens end up being refracted differently (coming out at different places) than the rays that are closer to the center.

What is spherical aberration, why does it happen, and how can you avoid it? Find out all you need to know right here in this guide!