There are several big competitors out in the field. Since a few years 3D AOI is getting more and more populair. The reliability is much higher compared to comparing grey scales (pixels) with one another. Measuring the height, length and width of a component is much better in every way. Although, some companies do advertise their products as 3D, there are only a few (big ones) that are actually full 3D. Some have 3D as an option.
If, through other means, you can tackle a lot of your errors, there's no need for an expensive machine. In our company, we have a variety of issues; polarity, wrong component, no solder, upside downs, shorts, missing components, etc. etc. etc. We prefer the best of the best AOI machine, if...there was such a thing. Every machine has it's flaws, it's no different with an AOI machine. We have the Koh Young Zenith which seems to do the job quite well, to a certain degree. (the flaws again) We can discover many more mistakes compared to the AOI we used before. Due to privacy reasons I can't name the former.
If you're a high volume low mix company, Koh Young's Zenith is certainly a very reliable one. Even with high mix and low volume, like we have, it is stable enough to do it's job. Programming is quite easy, depending on the way you set up your library. If you have an internal library it can work even better to program faster. But yet again, it depends on what you want to inspect. We bought the Koh Young and use every aspect of it. There are companies who bought the machine and turned off a lot of functionalities.
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