Hello INGE FI,
I know what you are going through. A few years back, I was faced with having to purchase AOI equipment for my business. My selection team and I looked at several different AOI manufacturers. We found that only two AOI vendors were suitable for a low to medium volume production environment (simple programming!) and fit our budgetary requirements. These two vendors were YESTech and MIRTEC. I have two friends in the industry who looked at the Saki system but had the same reservations as you regarding the software interface. Therefore, my team and I did not even consider this system.
We had an opportunity to work with both the YESTech and MIRTEC machines on our production floor. We found that the programming was very similar between the two machines. Personally I thought that the MIRTEC software was more comprehensive. But the main reason why we selected MIRTEC was the fact that the machine consistently provided better defect coverage than the competitive system, especially with regard to solder inspection. We also ran a very simple Gage R&R test on the two systems. The MIRTEC machine easily won.
Although I was less concerned with throughput, the MIRTEC machine was about two and a half times faster with about 20% less false calls. This did help with my ROI, but as I mentioned before, defect coverage was the real concern. That is the reason why I wanted AOI in the first place!
Since then I have purchased two additional MIRTEC machines including a new MV7 in line machine. I decided to go with the Intelli-Scan laser option on this machine. This is a secondary laser inspection system that allows you to test for coplanarity of leaded and non-leaded devices using laser height measurement.
Do yourself a favor, check out MIRTEC. In my opinion this is the best investment that I have ever made.
Best of luck with your AOI project...
Tony_D
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