Optronics next generation of advanced scientific grade CCD imaging cameras

Santa Barbara, CA - January 10, 2005- Optronics®, a manufacturer of easy-to-use, high performance digital cameras for microscopy, announces an innovative and versatile quantitative megapixel 2kx2k monochrome digital camera with a 500% increase in field of view.

MacroFireä monochrome incorporates a 4-megapixel CCD measuring 21.4mm in diagonal with 2048 x 2048 pixels that are 7.4 x 7.4 microns square, with a 40,000 electron well depth; the optimal size for low-light photomicrography imaging applications where increased sensitivity and increased dynamic range are important. Other cameras utilize CCD's with smaller pixels that limit well depth, which will restrict dynamic range, resulting in less sensitivity and a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio.

Applications for the MacroFire monochrome include a wide range of analytical automated and manual inspection processes that include but are not limited to: Brightfield/Darkfield Microscopy, Fluorescence Microscopy, DNA analysis, NIR Imaging, Semiconductor Inspection, Failure and Forensic Analysis.

MacroFire monochrome camera controls feature: electronic shutter control, manual and automatic white balance, white balance presets ROI with definable size, user settings files, 5-binning modes, 2-independent sub framing modes and a universal IEEE-1394 interface.

The MacroFire monochrome incorporates its own easy to use native application for camera command and control that runs within the included Optronics PictureFrame 2.2 imaging application.

PictureFrame 2.2 includes a new graphical user interface (GUI) that controls the CRI Macro*Color™ tunable liquid crystal RGB filter. Three independent exposures can be taken and combined automatically, generating a high resolution RGB color image. The implementation of this filter provides full CCD pixel utilization and full co-site sampled RGB resolution with resolution up to 12 million pixels for their line of quantitative monochrome cameras.

Other PictureFrame 2.2 features include: Auto-Exposure, Live Pseudo Coloring that permits the human eye to discriminate in real-time millions of intensity levels within a monochrome image and Live Frame Averaging with Motion Compensation Control that increases dynamic range and reduces read noise. Other real-time functions include live Gamma, Brightness, Contrast control and much more. MacroFire monochrome offers an SDK, is Twain compliant and is compatible with many third party scientific imaging applications.

Optronics will distribute MacroFire monochrome through its sales and marketing channel of highly qualified regional microscopy dealers and independent Value Added Resellers.
For more information please see the company web site.