I bought a camera off Amazon, got it hooked up but I wasn’t impressed with it. Main problem is do to my camera mount on the lid I couldn’t get a close up on anything I laid on the bed. Is that because of the camera I used? Also had a hard time doing the calibration, had a section of the bed missing. I know LB sells them now, but does anyone else have a good camera to use? I have a 700 x 500 bed.
Side note…my computer and laser are on opposite sides of the garage, be neat if there was a LB app that could be used to “use the camera” from. I know there are more important things… Love the software.
What does LightBurn report as the image size when you do a capture on the Lens Calibration screen?
Can you post a screen shot of the view from the camera in LightBurn? 170 degrees is a very strong fisheye to correct for, so you’re going to get some image loss.
Checkout the lightburn page, it has all the information on how to calculate whats needed for the camera. @LightBurn has also been kind enough to offer a “supported” camera you can order directly from them. HUGE convenience!
Is it better to have the camera mounted further away from the laser bed so a narrower lens can be used (80 or 90 deg) or to mount the camera closer and use a wider lens? Assuming you have a choice in the distance of where you can mount the camera.
Based on what I have read I think the answer is to use the narrowest lens possible.
But being further away must reduce the resolution, while using a wider lens introduces lots of optical distortion that must be corrected. So is it an even trade off or is reducing the optical distortion always the most important criteria?
Just my opinion: I’m sure you can find cameras a bit cheaper than buying from Lightburn but is it worth the messing around? Personally I did not hesitate to order a lightburn camera mostly out of appreciation for the great software and good service. my 2 cents…
I understand, I just wanted to throw that out there. I just got mine yesterday and hope to get it mounted and working today. I have a chinese 6040 (blue/white). Too close to mount for closed lid. I ordered a 90 degree.
That would be handy…I don’t have any hardwires in my garage. I use WiFi, I just have 2 cords of 25 feet in length running across the floor of my garage in order to have the computer and camera connected to the laser.
Each of the bands here is the same number of degrees wide, but they vary dramatically in width where they hit the imaginary bed at the bottom. This means that the middle area of the image has more camera pixels per mm than the edges do, and the wider the lens, the worse this gets, which is why really extreme fisheye lenses squeeze the image together around the outside edge. This translates directly into a loss of accuracy on the edges of the image.
If you can use a 170 or 180 degree camera, but keep the bed image within the central part of the image (not touching the edge) you’d likely be OK, but that also implies you could use a narrower field of view lens, which in turn gets you more camera pixels per mm of bed.
I have ordered the next round of cameras, but we’re looking at sometime around Valentine’s Day for the 60/90 variants because of Chinese New Year. I will have 120/140/160 degree versions restocked hopefully Monday.
The bed dimensions are half of the information needed. The other half is the height above the bed that you plan to mount the camera. Without both pieces of info I can’t tell you which lens you need. With a 140 degree lens and a 900mm bed, you would need to mount the camera at least 500mm above the bed to get all of it in the camera view.
), so I’m guessing they’ll be restocked, but probably not soon.