Why lighting is important to quality analysis

The importance of choosing the right lighting

It may seem insignificant or downright boring to be talking about lighting, but ensuring sufficient and adequate lighting will actually have a huge impact to the analysis results during quality control and satisfaction of the customers in the end. If the lighting is inadequate or insufficient, the results will be doubtful at best and not usable at worst. This means double the work, affects productivity and even how satisfied the staff is with their work. Nobody wants that.

How to get the lighting just right

Now that we’ve established why it is so crucial that the sample is all lit up, let’s talk about how to get this right. First of all, the surroundings in the inspection area are important.

Small rooms with fluorescent lamps are a no go whereas larger facilities with a great amount of natural light from outside are to be preferred. This will provide the most life-like scenario, which is the first step towards reproducing the sample as true to reality as possible on the screen.

Magnifying and enhancing the important details 

When it comes to the inspection equipment itself, a digital microscope with built-in light that’ll magnify and enhance those important details on the sample is a good start. Manually customizing the microscope exposure settings to the individual inspection setup will further improve the results. Even better is to add a high quality light source, which will leave nothing uncertain or unseen.

Choosing a high quality light source

Adding a high quality ring light to the digital microscope is one way to ensure these conditions. Such a solution will provide the operator with the ability to adjust and fit the light to the exact usage, the sample in question and the surroundings provided. Now, while adding a light source like this will generate a wide range of possibilities, the art is to choose just the right light for the scenario in question. Because while insufficient lighting is a liability, too much light will also create difficult conditions for the operator. Therefore, the integration and customization of the ring light also plays an important role in getting the lighting just right.

• Saving both light and camera settings as presets with quick recall, due to microscope integration, saves process time and provides focus on the task at hand
• Light intensity, segmentation of the light and rotation of those segments are important in order to control the light to pay attention to the right details on the sample
• The placement of the LED diodes plays a role when reproducing the entire sample with nothing left in the dark because the diodes are located too far apart
• Adding filters and additional lenses will enable the user to control the light even further and thereby concentrate or even out the light

These aspects will all together enable the user to perform a high level of quality control.