A focus on the scientific camera market

What is PCO’s place in the high-performance and scientific camera market?
PCO is one of the leading manufacturers of high-performance camera systems. For 25 years the company has been making and developing cameras for scientific imaging, metrology and quality-control. We are usually competing with different companies, who range from low-light, low-noise, sensitive applications up to high-speed and high-dynamic imaging. With our proven knowledge and familiar contact with worldwide researchers, we are able to offer the most advanced technology to our customers. We also aim to combine this with an excellent service, ensuring that every customer goes home satisfied.

How does the development and manufacture of high-performance scientific cameras differ from mass digital camera production?
Since the requirements for each product’s performance are very different, it takes far more effort to offer high-linearity, excellent image quality, and the low-noise performance that our customers expect and need. For the correction and calibration of our cameras it takes extremely sophisticated algorithms in the cameras and test set-ups for the quality control of the camera’s system. In mass production, the manufacturing price is the most important optimisation topic. For us it is the image quality, and this sometimes this is not particularly easy to achieve.

CMOS technology is changing the digital photography industry. What is PCO’s involvement in the process?
A couple of years ago I was convinced that it takes a good CCD image sensor to create a good scientific camera, except maybe for high-speed applications (leading to high-frame rates) which are not usually possible with the serial readout architecture of CCD image sensors. Since the introduction of scientific CMOS, which we helped to co-develop, this has changed very much, because it offers performance data that we can reach with CCD image sensors. Firstly we took part in the CMOS image sensor application, and nowadays we contribute in trying to reach new levels of performance with CMOS technology. However, the company doesn’t do CMOS image sensor design itself, but only collaborates with some outstanding companies in this field.

Many digital imaging companies are struggling to stay afloat, and some are even facing bankruptcy. How has PCO fared in this crisis?
We have also seen many firms struggle in the high-speed camera business. I guess our advantage lies in the diversity of our niche market areas. If one area is weak, we can improve and profit from the others. We saw some sales drop during the recent economical crisis, sometimes with a delay, as research money tends to decrease over a period of around two years. However, the drop was never more than 10 percent and since last year it is steadily growing again. We believe that this growth is a more sustained and lasting development. Whatever the economic climate, with our technological expertise and new ideas, we are always able to offer products of high quality.

What are PCO’s plans for the future?
The company is always looking into new technologies, while trying to improve the performance of our existing  camera systems. We always strive to satisfy all our customers, from those who want to use the camera as a measuring device, to the customer who is looking for the best possible image quality to capture stunning images. To achieve this we are always pushing the latest and most advanced technology in electronics to its limits.