Color Sensors Displace Older Methods

摘要

REMEMBER WHEN JUDY GARLAND landed in Oz, and the movie went from black and white (B+W) to brilliant color? Well, that's what's been happening to the world of photoelectric sensors lately. Many users formerly satisfied with B+W, grayscale or contrast sensing want more complex and sophisticated capabilities, and they're looking for color sensors to provide them - and do it fast on production lines without having to pull samples for analysis. But, that's not the end of the story because innovations give contrast sensors some more colorful capabilities, too. "Our users are getting into some very small areas to view colors, such as on pencils and carpeting, and so they're benefiting from using a true color sensor, which can look at the whole spectrum, perform CIELab calculations internally, set up algorithms, and automatically distinguish even very small color values and shade differences without sending a sample to a lab," says Joe Poelmann, applications engineering at Balluff (www.balluff.com). CIELab are standards from the International Commission on Illumination (ICC, www.cie.co.at/cie) for accurately determining visible colors.