If you’ve been watching the technology shift from CCD’s to CMOS, you have probably also seen a ton of new image sensor names within the “Generations”. Honestly, its hard to keep track of all of Sony’s part numbers, so we will try to give you some insight into the progression of Sony’s Pregius image sensors used in industrial machine vision cameras.
1 – First, how can I tell if its a Sony Pregius generation sensor?
Sony has prefixes of the image sensors which make it easy to identify if its an ExView HAD sensor or Pregius sensor. Previous CCD, EXViewHAD sensors primarily in the last 10 years had a prefix of “ICX”. Example: ICX285, which was a great sensor back in the day. All new generation Sony Pregius sensors have a prefix of “IMX.” Example: IMX174 – which today is one of the best sensors for dynamic range..
2 – What is the differences in the “Generations” of Sony Pregius Image sensors?
Sony Pregius Generation 1: This primarily consisted of a 2.4MP resolution sensor with 5.86um pixels BUT had a well depth (saturation capacity) of 30Ke- and still unique in this regard within the generations. Sony also brought the new generations to the market with “slow” and “fast” versions of the sensors at two different price points. In this case, the IMX174 and IMX249 were incorporated into industrial machine vision cameras providing two levels of performance. Example being Dalsa Nano M1940 (52 fps) using IMX174 vs Dalsa Nano M1920 (39 fps) using IMX249, but the IMX249 is 40% less in price.
Sony Pregius Generation 2: The primary goal of Sony was to expand the portfolio of Pregius sensors which consists of VGA to 12 MP image sensors. However, the pixel size decreased to 3.45um along with well depth to ~ 10Ke-, but noise also decreased! The smaller pixels allowed smaller format lenses to be used saving overall system cost. However this became more taxing on lens resolution being able to resolve the 3.45um pixels! In general it offered a great family of image sensors and in turn an abundance of machine vision industrial cameras at lower cost than CCD’s with better performance.
Sony Pregius Generation 3: Sony’s has taken the best of both the Gen 1 and Gen 2 to create Gen 3! The pixel size increased to 4.5um increasing the well depth to 20Ke-! This generation has the fastest data rates, dynamic range and lowest noise. The family will expand from VGA to 7.1MP as well. We are just starting to see Gen 3 sensors in our machine vision camera lineup and expecting more to come through 2019+.
Sony Pregius image sensor Comparison Chart
Sony’s Pregius Product line up for machine vision industrial cameras below for reference as of April 2019
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