Newsgroups: sci.image.processing
From: alanb@jeolsys.demon.co.uk (Alan Brooker)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!pipex!demon!jeolsys.demon.co.uk!alanb
Subject: Re: CORECO FRAME GRABBERS any comments!
References: <DELPHIG.185.0015CD1C@CAM.ORG> <781270486snz@jeolsys.demon.co.uk> <pm-2CYm.arndtd@delphi.com>
Organization: JEOL UK Ltd
Reply-To: alanb@jeolsys.demon.co.uk
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Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 15:13:50 +0000
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Update on the CORECO F64.

The board duly arrived with all the correct cables and software, and once this 
was all connected up, software loaded etc. nothing happened.  This is of course 
perfectly normal, and a quick tweak of camera configuration files, changing a 
DIP switch on our mother board (to enable the VGA pass through), and rebooting; 
we were in business.

Synchronising the VGA signal got rid of nasty black lines down the left hand 
side of the image, and the live Megaplus signal was displayed.

All in all the installation was fairly painless (compared with some products 
that will remain nameless).  The quality of the images were very good if the 
monitor resolution was set to 1024x768, but there was considerable instability 
particularly in the overlay text when running at 1280x1024 resolution.

From our point of view, the most disappointing feature of the board is that 
there is no useable real time scaling.  The Megaplus image is pixel mapped to 
the screen - that is to say if you display the 1024x1024 Megaplus image on a 
1024x768 display, then you lose the bottom 256 lines.  Sure you can scroll the 
image up but this is a drag.

A trivial criticism you may think.  One of our requirements, however is for 
2048x2048 cameras - with these you can only see a quarter of the image, with 
the bottom chopped off at that.  Apparently integer division is possible on the 
fly, but this does not help with our other requirement where we have a digital 
scan generator creating any scans up to 4096x3072 (usually in a 4:3 aspect 
ratio).  Whilst the resolution is required for the digital image, we want it to 
be displayed as best it can be on the computer monitor.

To be a bit more positive though, the image processing operations worked fine - 
but the difference in processing speed between the on-board DSP and the host 
486/50 were nowhere near as marked as we would have expected.  Suffice to say 
that a P90 would probably outperform the board by a significant margin.

Other than that the build quality of the board was good, and the 
disgnostic/installation and test software got us going reasonably quickly.  

Moving on to the Megaplus... we use the 1.4 and have been pretty pleased with 
the results.  Our application is the digitisation of TEM (Transmission electron 
microscopes) images - here electrons have to be converted in to photons (via a 
phosphor and a mirror, and the back to electrons again!

The low light level performance of the Megaplus is not really good enough for 
demanding circumstances, and we would like to be able to cool the CCD sensor.  
In addition, the maximum frame rate of the camera (5fps) is a shade on the slow 
side for real time operations (e.g. focussing, or moving samples).  Ideally we 
would like the opportunity to run at 512x512 TV-rate *or* 1024x1024 slow scan.  
The Astromed cameras will do this, but htey are expensive.

In summary, the Megaplus is an excellent camera for the price, but cooling, 
binning, subsampling etc would be nice....


-- 
*---------------------------------------*----------------------------------*
| Dr.Alan Brooker                       | Email: alanb@jeolsys.demon.co.uk |
| Product Support Manager               |                                  |
| JEOL (UK) Ltd., JEOL House,           |   Tel: +44 (0) 707 377117        |  
| Watchmead, Welwyn Garden City,        |   Fax: +44 (0) 707 373254        |        
| Herts, AL7 1LT, United Kingdom        |                                  |
*---------------------------------------*----------------------------------*
