Freetargets

WEB-Cameras

The laser pulse can be recognized very well with normal WEB cams. Infrared lasers are unfortunately not recognized enough or not at all. The infrared filter of the camera must be removed for infrared laser trainers. But like everything in life, WEB cams have their advantages and disadvantages

  • Benefits

    • Economical
    • May already exist in notebooks as a rear camera
    • High number of frames per second (f/sec) due to manual settings
    • Practical and useful

  • Disadvantage

    • Bad resolution
      Although images can be output in HD resolution, the images are interpolated internally in most cameras. Low-cost 600 × 480/640 × 480 sensors are also usually installed in HD-WEB-Cams, the images are then extrapolated internally to higher resolutions. Laser pulse detection is only as good as the real resolution of the image sensor
    • Small lenses
      Since the lenses (lenses) of WEB-Cams are very small compared to the size of the image sensor, very little light can fall on the usually inexpensive and correspondingly slow image sensor. However, since the sensor requires a certain amount of light energy, the exposure time must be longer. This results in a low frame rate (frames per second) and a correspondingly delayed shot detection.
      This effect can be compensated for by manually reducing the exposure time within the WEB-Cam control software. The image of the WEB-Cam is almost black as a result, but the laser pulse is still sufficiently recognized
    • No zoom lens
      The image of the WEB-Cam cannot be optically adjusted to the size of the filmed screen. A digital adjustment looks good, but does not increase the resolution. The smaller the filmed screen within the WEB-Cam pictures, the lower the accuracy of the shot detection
    • USB2 connection
      The USB2 interface is practical, but actually not a good computer interface. Extreme overhead (additional data to the actual WEB-Cam images) and extreme computer resource consumption (resources that may then be missing in your training units)