How to change the camera's exposure time in Labview and suggestions on purchasing cameras

[AlexZLee]

Thanks Bob!!! I really appreciate the help! I will look into this camera!

[AlexZLee]

Thanks Alex! I did find it possible to control some webcams at eariler stage when I launch a quick demo. However, I need a more scientific c mount camera to hook up to a microscope to do research. So unfortunatly I have to find a more scientific camera.

[AlexZLee]

Hey Vince,

Thanks for your reply! What a coincidence! I was looking at Basler camera these days because I found a article talking about controlling the camera's exposure time (Figure 8 at thie link http://www.ni.com/tutorial/5750/en/). I wish you could told me this eariler so I won't struggle for such a long time. But thank you very much for the information. 

Here is the full stroy, hopefully this could help for those people who might have troubles about the cameras in the future.

I called a Basler distributer in TX, US (http://www.graftek.com/pages/scA640-70gm.htm) to ask about the camera (scA640-70gm) mentioned as an example in the link from NI. Pretty much all cameras from Basler are compatible with Labview vison module and the exposure time could be changed under MAX or programmed in a Labview VI. This camera uses a CCD sensor and it is around $800. The sales person is very nice and he recommends me the aca1920-40gm camera instead and this one is around $500. It uses a better CMOS sensor and it should work better. Based on the table which Vince posted, the exposure time for the aca1920-40um could go as high as 10 sec, which is good enough. I have already compared the aca1920-40um and aca1920-40gm. They use the same sensor and the only difference is that the "um" uses USB 3 interface while the "gm" uses GigE interface. So I probably would switch gear to the USB interface one as it does not need a power supply as the GigE one.

I will update my work.

[Vince84]

Another good thing about the Basler cameras is that they have C-mount threading, which is one of the most common standards for microscope cameras, for my application I am actually using a Hama C-mount to Nikon adapter, and the whole thing looks really funny because of the size of the camera (£1 coin for comparison):

The only downside of using USB3 Vision is that you wont be able to use them with current cRIO devices (limited USB3 Vision support), but from what I gathered from your application, speed is not an issue for you! xD

Good luck and have fun with the camera.