I currently use 3 different AOI pieces of equipment at my factory. 1. Photon Dynamics....Company no longer supports 2. Agilent SJ-50 3. Orbotech The Agilents were in house first and have met our requirments for coverage on the following: Presence and Absence, Polarity, bridging, solder joint (sufficient/insufficient) and Coplainarity to a point. (This system is 2d and catches issues by noting solderjoint irregularity. The Orbotech system uses multiple cameras and will be able to do a more thorough job on coplainarity. Shadowing comes into play with angled cameras but with the type of lighting that has been shown on the Orbotech I have not seen this elevate to an issue. We have also put their system through its paces on Paste inspection and it has excelled in this area. Both the Agilent and the Orbotech allow for teaching in a short period of time compared to other pieces of equipment I have used. The steps needed to teach the components are user friendly through each of their software settings. Please consider the following. Whichever way you decide to go you need to ask the companies where they are on a repeatable and dependable OCV/OCR for component value validation. I have seen applications from each company but they are both expanding in their R and D. Consider this a return on investment. The reason we have a Photon Dynamics in house is due to its OCV capabilites. I can take a PCB that usually takes an individual 4 hours to complete an First Article inspection and the machine allows me to cut this to less than 2 hours the first time and the next time this PCB is set up FAI can be completed in a matter of minutes. A new machine that does as well as an Orbotech or Agilent on component presence/absence, bridge detect, solderjoint and polarity and also may be used for component ID could pay for itself in uptime in a short period depending upon how often you set up on builds and the complexity required to complete an FAI. --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 -----------------------------------------------------