Prosilica Gigabit Ethernet (GigE Vision) Cameras on Laptops

Prosilica's GE-Series gigabit Ethernet cameras run well on laptop computers that are properly equiped with a suitable gigabit Ethernet port and that have ample RAM and CPU power. However, there are some issues to be aware of:

Built-in Gigabit Ethernet port - It is now fairly common for laptop computers to have a gigabit Ethernet port built in. To reduce CPU loading when using a GigE Vision camera on a laptop, the built-in GigE port should support Jumbo Frames of at least 8 kB in size. The Intel chipset used in some laptops supports jumbo frames even larger than 8 kB and has performed well in Prosilica tests.

Cardbus port - If your laptop does not have a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port, or if your built-in port does not support Jumbo Frames, you could use a CardBus NIC instead. Prosilica recommends using gigabit network adaptors that support jumbo frames of 8 kB or larger. However, many laptop Cardbus / PCMCIA cards do not support jumbo frames, or only support jumbo frames up to 3 kB (8 kB or larger is recommended). Two cards that Prosilica has tested support Jumbo frames up to 7 kB: the U.S. Robotics Gigabit Ethernet CardBus NIC, model 7903 was one, and the LinkSys Gigabit Notebook Adaptor, model PCM1000. Both of these cards worked fine during brief tests, but required that the packet size parameter on the camera be set to 7100 or less.

ExpressCard - If you laptop has an ExpressCard port (PCI express), we recommend using the Sonnet Presto Gigabit Ethernet Pro Express Card/34. This card support jumbo frames up to 9kB meaning that you can use the full packet size of the camera to acheive a lower CPU load. This card also supports Link Aggregation (LAG).

Prosilica's GigE cameras will also work fine on ports that do not support Jumbo Frames, but in such cases, the camera PacketSize parameter needs to be adjusted the match the network card; PacketSize = 1500 will work in such cases.