What Vision 2026 Told Us About Where Machine Vision Is Heading
Vision 2026 has closed its doors in Stuttgart and The Engineers Arms has called last orders. Three days at Vision is the best health check the machine vision industry gets, with almost the whole supply chain in the same halls showing where it is heading next.
Four trends stood out to us. Camera hardware is getting smarter, 3D has gone mainstream, the big suppliers are converging and AI is changing how vision systems get built.
We work with many of the manufacturers on the floor and with the engineers who build their products into real systems, which lets us hear both sides of the conversation. Here is what we saw and what we think it means for the people who build and buy vision systems.
Product innovation, with LUCID setting the pace
Every show brings new products. With LUCID it is the pace that stands out. Plenty of bigger companies cannot match its cadence of hardware innovation.
Since the last Vision in 2024, LUCID has brought the compact 10GigE Triton10 and the 25GigE Atlas25 to market. It has launched the Triton Smart with AI processing on the sensor itself. Its Helios2 Chroma range pairs time-of-flight depth and colour in one factory-calibrated IP67 unit. This year it brought an 8K line scan version of the Triton10 to Stuttgart as well.
The pick of the bunch for us was the Triton All-In-One. It answers what we see the market asking for, which is more value from a GigE camera. LUCID has built a 3.2 MP Sony IMX900 global shutter sensor, a liquid lens and programmable LED lighting into one IP67 camera weighing around 100 g. It connects over 2.5GigE with Power over Ethernet. Because the lens and lights sit inside the sealed housing, there is no separate IP67 lens tube to fit.
The Triton All-In-One on the LUCID stand, here the mono TAO034S-M06R with red light.
Focus and lighting are both controlled in software. The liquid lens refocuses with no moving parts, which lets one camera cover several working distances. The LEDs are matched to the field of view of the lens. Engineers can save focus and lighting settings, sequence them and copy them from one camera to the next through LUCID's Arena software.
Smart cameras and code readers have combined optics and lighting for years. The Triton All-In-One brings that convenience to an open GigE Vision camera that streams images into the developer's own software.
Optics and lighting are where so many vision projects are won or lost. Choosing a lens, mounting a light and setting focus all take engineering time before a single image is analysed. For the many applications that suit its two lens options and built-in light, system developers have much less to worry about. They can spend that time on the application instead.
LUCID lists four models for Q2 2027. There are colour versions with white light and mono versions with red light, each with a 6 mm or 12 mm lens.
The Triton Lite is a different kind of innovation, one in cost optimisation. It uses the same 3.2 MP Sony IMX900 global shutter sensor as the All-In-One, with a standard C-mount and an RJ45 GigE connection. For OEMs building cameras into their own products in volume, taking cost out matters as much as adding features.
LUCID's Triton Lite at Vision 2026.
3D vision has gone mainstream
Not long ago 3D was a specialist corner of machine vision, kept for the applications that could not do without it. That has changed.
Machine vision captures 3D in four main ways, through laser triangulation, time-of-flight, structured light and stereo. All four are now available from several manufacturers at price points that bring 3D into everyday applications.
We put all four side by side on our own stand. Two laser triangulation profilers, the Zebra AltiZ and the Teledyne Z-Trak, worked together on high-accuracy dimensioning. Next to them a logistics picking demo read two filled totes with LUCID time-of-flight, Zebra Photoneo structured light and Teledyne stereo.
Every one of those cameras ran in the same software, Zebra's Aurora Design Assistant. The software matters as much as the hardware. When four 3D technologies from different manufacturers all run in one software environment, choosing between them becomes a straightforward engineering decision. It comes down to the accuracy, speed, working area and budget the application needs.
Logistics is where 3D is booming. Picking, depalletising and dimensioning all need depth rather than a flat image. The spread of technologies and price points is what now lets 3D meet that demand. Choosing the right technology is the conversation we have with customers moving into automated picking and depalletising. Our 3D camera range covers all four.
The big suppliers are converging
The supplier side of machine vision has been consolidating for years. At Vision 2026 we saw the next stage. Brands that were bought are now being brought together, with a unified product range and a clear, unified roadmap behind them. Exaktera, Zebra and Teledyne were the clearest examples.
Exaktera brings together Advanced Illumination, LUMIMAX, ProPhotonix, Z-LASER, VisioCablePro and autoVimation. Between them they cover LED lighting, laser modules, projection systems and protective enclosures. You may have seen one of them at work on our stand, where an Advanced Illumination light lit our line scan rig.
At Vision 2026 the whole Exaktera portfolio sat under one roof, with a clear focus on food inspection and logistics. There was a real specialism in IP67 and IP69K protection too, built for washdown lines and harsh environments.
Exaktera's food and beverage demo, inspecting doughnuts on a conveyor.
Exaktera's logistics demo.
Zebra is doing the same. Its machine vision range runs from fixed industrial scanners and smart cameras through area scan cameras, 3D, frame grabbers and vision controllers, all supported by its Aurora software family. The new CV70 shows how far that cohesion goes.
The CV70 is a family of CoaXPress 2.1 cameras with 5, 9, 18 and 25 MP models, single or dual link CXP-12 and up to 290 frames per second. All of that fits in a body just 35 x 35 x 49 mm. It works with Zebra's own CoaXPress frame grabbers and Aurora software.
Heat is the usual weak spot of a small, fast camera. At only 4 W the CV70 needs nothing more than passive cooling. Touch one that has been running and you will not burn your hand, which is not true of every compact high-end camera. Zebra designed the CV70 and builds it itself, a real statement that it now creates its own innovative machine vision camera hardware.
Zebra CV70 CoaXPress cameras in a demo at Vision 2026.
Teledyne has brought DALSA, Coreco, e2v, Adimec and Point Grey together under one name. It also manufactures its own image sensors, which gives it control from the sensor up. At Vision 2026 all of that was presented as one range.
For customers this should be good news. A unified range means fewer gaps between products that were never designed to work together, more consistent software and a roadmap you can plan a product around.
AI moves from the image to the engineer
AI was everywhere again this year. The difference was where it showed up. At the last few shows AI has mostly meant AI in the image, deep learning that classifies parts, finds defects and reads difficult text. This year the most interesting AI was aimed at the people who build vision systems.
Many of the main machine vision software toolkits were showing early demos or betas of agentic development tools. Instead of writing every step by hand, you describe the job and an AI agent builds much of the vision application with you. We think this is game changing.
Software developers everywhere have embraced AI assistants like Claude to write code faster. We know the effect first hand, because the scoring application behind our darts game was built with AI coding tools. Now machine vision companies are building tools of their own, designed around the specific job of creating vision applications.
This will democratise machine vision. The technology has rarely been the real barrier to adoption. Knowledge has. A large part of that knowledge is the software side of building a vision application, which is exactly the part these tools take on. That opens machine vision up to many more OEMs, integrators and manufacturers.
What the tools will not do is choose the camera, the optics or the lighting. A vision system still succeeds or fails on those, which is why the hardware trends above matter just as much. These tools are also early. Our view is that full releases are still 12 to 18 months away. When they land they will change how quickly an idea becomes a working vision system on a production line.
The best conversations happen at the bar
Trends are only half of what makes Vision worth the trip. The other half is people. Vision is the event that lets us sit down with partners, customers and friends from across the industry, compare notes and work out what we can build together next. The Engineers Arms was built for that.
Thank you to everyone who came to find us in Hall 10, whether for the demos, a game of darts or a drink at the bar. That includes Laith Marmash, Laurie Partington and Brian Donnelly, three of the partners and friends who took a turn at the oche or shared a beer with us.
Laith Marmash of Zebra at the oche.
Vision League winner Laith, top of the leaderboard with 135.
Laurie Partington of Zebra at The Engineers Arms.
Brian Donnelly, VP of Sales at Teledyne, at the oche.
Vision League winner Brian with his trophy.
If any of these trends touch a project you are planning, from 3D for logistics to high-speed CoaXPress or a smarter GigE camera, we would like to hear about it. Get in touch with our team, email info@clearview-imaging.com or call +44 (0)1844 217270.
You can also revisit our Vision 2026 preview or browse our 3D cameras, 2D cameras and line scan cameras, with our Complete Camera Guide to help you choose.