Cooling a Digital Camera?

thusson asks: "I work at a lab doing intrinsic signal imaging of cat and mouse visual cortex (brains). We are using a Dalsa 1M60P camera, and we want to cool it about 30-50 degrees C to improve picture quality by reducing noise. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to do this? So far, heat sinks have helped but only by a few degrees. I figure the overclocking community is a good place for novel ideas."

Comments

Peltier elements

[amelagar]

Peltier elements are the way to go here. They're small, accurate and powerful. Anything you want in a scientific environment.

Cooling a digital camera

[Mendenhall]

As a number of people have correctly pointed out briefly, Peltier effect devices, also known as thermoelectric coolers (TE coolers) are the most likely way to accomplish this. There are companies (Products for Research, e.g.) that specialize in pre-packaged TE cooling units for various types of equipment. The basic coolers almost all come from Melcor.

With very careful design and construction, you can use a multi-stage TE cooler to get more than a 50C offset from room temperature. It requires careful attention to insulation, and to heatsinking of the first (hottest) stage.

Before you go cooling your camera, though, you should check whether it is designed to run cold. Any device, cooled to -30C (or even to 10 degrees below room temperature, in Tennessee humidity) will start to condense water. To run a camera cold, it must be designed to be water-tight, and must almost certainly have a dry-gas-filled double window (or vacuum double window) on the front, with the outer window heated to prevent fogging.

Overall, unless the camera was specifically designed to be cooled, you may be better off buying one that is appropriately designed, unless you have a lot of time, money, and expertise to put into the engineering. Certainly talk to the manufacturers of the camera you have before you start cooling it, and see if they sell a kit cor conversion.

Your question is not very specific

[Cecil]

But I will try:

There are two solutions to this problem. The first, is to cool your sensor like you asked. A peltier cooler in between the sensor and the heatsink is the only way to do this. A heatsink will reduce you to ambient temperature at best. If you want to go below that, you need a peltier cooler at least, or something much more exotic like a compressor-based refrigeration unit, evaporative cooler, or liquid nitrogen cooling.

Alternately, you could use a CCD with a cooler already built in, such as those from Santa Barbara Instrument Group.

Finally, you could simply use a sensor that isn't so noisy. All the digital SLR cameras nowadays use CMOS sensor technology, because it's bigger than CCD primarily, but it also has a lot less noise since it isn't crammed into such a small space.

Another approach often used by astronomers is to take the noisy CCD, do an exposure of a given length, then cover it so no light can reach it, and take another exposure of the same length to create a "dark frame" that contains nothing but noise. The noise in both images will be approximately equal, and can be subtracted out using photoshop or similar software, resulting in a very clean image.

Re:Piezo - NOT

[marcus]

It is a Peltier device. It's real. It works. One side gets hot, the other cold. It's just a solid state heat pump. Do your own googles, try "thermoelectric" if "peltier" doesn'te net enough, for further info.