November 2, 2005, San Jose, CA--Photon has begun shipping USBeamPro, a high dynamic beam profiler and dedicated software package with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 interface.
This equipment provides a high level of portability for beam profiling, since a peripheral frame grabber card is not required. Thus, the equipment can be easily transferred to different laptop or desktop computers without the additional step of installing a frame grabber card and the required software drivers into the computer.
The USBeamPro features a CMOS 2/3" format sensor, with a 1280 x 1024 active pixel imaging array of pixel dimensions 6.7 microns x 6.7 microns and an overall array size 8.6 mm x 6.9 mm. Its small form factor of 54 mm x 54 mm x 33 mm allows ease of placement into an optical path.
The nominal dynamic range of this array is 30 dB (10 bits of digitization), although Photon has developed a data acquisition technique to obtain profiles with as a high 48 dB of dynamic range (>16 bits of digitization). Achieving this dynamic range previously required more expensive silicon based detector arrays. High dynamic range is important in many applications, especially lens characterization, where lens aberrations are apparent from faint features around a strong central peak in the beam profile.