Dealing with halogen lighting.

solarradiation · Jul 9, 2003

I'm trying to get hold of a very specific piece of equipment.

I am attempting to incorporate some kind of digital camera system into a solar radiation chamber. I'm in a testing field, where samples are subjected to artificially created UV light for 10 days. Monitioring these samples has proven to be difficult.

The main problem is that the UV creating bulbs have a frequency that make most "off the shelf" cameras have too much flickering. I do have a camera, that when I adjust the exposure I can see the samples I'm dealing with, but then I mainly see a reflection from the UV light. Also, the resolution just isn't there.

The type of tester that I am trying to incorpoprate with the camera can be viewed at the website below:

http://www.q-panel.com/html/q-sun.html

The camera would also have to be fairly small, although this isn't critical.

Any help would be very much appreciated! I've tried looking around, but I just can't seem to find what I need.

mrsid99 · Jul 9, 2003

I'm assuming you're looking for artifacts such as cracks in plastic or painted surfaces or discoloration or similar so the definition has to be fairly good and I'm also assuming you'll need the ability to zoom.
This suggests a commonly available type of digital camera and to get over the flickering as you say you'll need a fairly long exposure.
If it's not possible to reduce the aperture size sufficiently to prevent over exposure you may want to consider filters to simply reduce the total light level.
HTH.