![]() ![]() With 8 megapixel displays (4K resolution), however, a single camera would need around 100 million pixels – and that camera doesn’t exist. With VGA displays, this is relatively easy. But when you have a 2D structure on a piece of glass, manufacturers soon found that it’s far easier to do an area scan as it’s not dependent on the velocity of the panel during inspection.’Īccording to Dinev, the usual rule of thumb for inspecting one panel pixel is to have 8 to 12 camera pixels. ‘When we first entered that market more than 10 years ago, area scan cameras – which can quickly image a defined, stationary area – were rarely used given the speed offered by line scan cameras, which use a single row of pixels to capture images of objects as they move quickly past the camera. ‘We have a very strong presence in Asia, and our cameras are used to inspect anything with a flat screen, from LCD TVs to tablets and mobile phones,’ explained Dinev. Applications within these markets include the deployment of cameras on satellites, planes and drones systems for inspecting solar cells within solar panels and flat panel inspection – something that Imperx has been heavily involved in since 2004. Today, Imperx is home to 65 members of staff, and operates in many diverse markets including aviation and consumer electronics. For this reason, it also attracted attention from the military and veterinarians – it’s far easier to take a scanner to a horse, for example, than it is to transport the animal to the scanner. Imperx’s technology enabled scanning kits to be portable, with users simply plugging a card into their laptops. Ultrasonic equipment was still generally very bulky and generated standard video signals. Given that portable imaging devices were a core focus of the company, a perfect market for Imperx also proved to be the medical industry. That determination paid off and Imperx’s first contract was to provide a police force with frame grabbers and cameras for recording traffic violations directly to laptops. You have to do everything possible to survive.’ ‘You have to be committed to the point that “failure” is not a word that could even enter your vocabulary. ‘I wanted to make cameras – that really was the driving force – and when you start a company the way I did, there really is no chance of failure,’ he commented. Finding money from investors was close to impossible, and so Imperx began in Dinev’s garage, funded by his credit cards. In 2001, Imperx was born and its first product was the world’s first laptop frame grabber for standard video.ĭinev explained that launching Imperx was quite a daunting experience as the company began shortly after two consecutive stock market crashes. Dinev’s dissertation was awarded with the prestigious Merrill Lynch Forum Innovation Grants Competition in 1998, and his proposed card was developed and later became known as a ‘frame grabber for laptops’. Dinev was in the midst of completing his doctoral dissertation on ‘Ultrasound Brain Imaging’ as part of his PhD in Electrical Engineering, and he proposed that an ultrasonic device meeting Nasa’s specifications would require a video digitising card that could capture the video information and transmit that raw data to a laptop – and such a card didn’t exist. The challenging task ahead was to reduce the equipment in size such that it would fit inside a standard briefcase. Leaving behind a career spanning both academia and industry, Dinev and his family moved to the United States in the early 1990s, where he began working for Nasa to develop portable ultrasonic equipment capable of being deployed on a space shuttle.Īt that time, ultrasonic equipment was the size of a refrigerator, making it logistically unsuitable for use on a shuttle. Holding a MSc degree in Applied Physics from Sofia University in Bulgaria, Dinev’s fascination with cameras began when researching his thesis on how to implement cameras and ground-based telescopes. The story of Imperx, a leading designer and manufacturer of high performance digital cameras and frame grabbers, can be traced back to a small garage in Florida’s Boca Raton, USA, where in 2001 its founder and president, Petko Dinev, set about developing the world’s first frame grabbers for laptops. ![]()
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