anyone with Vision System experience???

[bob15]

Anyone have any experience with Vision Systems? We are looking at replacing our 3 OGP Flash 302 machines (they are pushing 10-12 years old) and am curious about the offerings from Mitutoyo and Hexagon as well as OGP. I honestly wasn't really sold on the Starrett machines, or are their sales sheet bad, but great machines? Anyone have any insight as to are they really that much different, manufacturer to manufacturer? One machine will be running a program (and the same parts) all the time, machines 2 & 3 are more "manual-mode" doing 1, 2, maybe 15 pieces of production and non-production parts.

I saw the Mitutoyo last week and plan on seeing the Hexagon next week and hopefully a newer OGP in the near future.

Looking at:
Flash 302 & Quest 300 - OGP
QV Apex Pro - mitutoyo
Optiv Dual Scan & 3.2.2

Anyone have any experience with these machines....good or bad? I hate relying on sales-people only.....

 

[trytochaseme]

We recently got a QV Active 302 and I love it. Its been great so far but I also have 0 experiecne with any other machines. We got it with a probe and I find myself using the probe much more often but thats just because for our parts the probe is easier. We also got a pretty killer deal on this machine as it was a demo model. If you have any questions about it I will try to answer them.

The one Issue I did have is I had a small crash and the machine freaked out and the alarm wouldn't reset. Mitutoyo said It needed to be recalibrated and was gonna charge us $5000. We literally got the machine 3 weeks prior and there was no way I could tell my boss I broke it and was gonna cost 5k to fix already. It was also a super light bump it didn't make sense that something would be broke. I called the guy who installed in and set it up and he agreed that it didn't make sense. He also said these things get crash all the time and he has never had to recalibrate one because of a crash. He went back and forth with me a bit and the fix ended up being a blown $3 fuse.

 

[bob15]

Thanks for the input.

I am going to look at the Hexagon (brown & sharp/tesa) on Friday and hopefully the newer OGP Flash after July 4th week. The Mitutoyo looked nice, but the guy doing the demonstration was frustrating to watch as he kept making boxes for measurements as if we were setting up a program. I couldn't get him to just make a straight line on two different edges of the part and give a dimension. After Hexagon and OGP, I might go back to Mito.....but, considering we have had decent luck with the three machines from OGP for the past 10-12 years, I'm not ready to tell our company we want to change brands for no real reason. Not at $100k a machine.