Acquisition technology has seen major changes in the last few years, particularly with the adoption of new bus technologies. Traditional frame grabber technology has been joined by a range of generic interfaces such as FireWire and USB (2.0 and 3.0) along with Gigabit Ethernet.
When designing a system, users often focus solely on the technology required to make the acquisition work. A lot of time is spent diagnosing why systems have intermittent failures and the answer is often to be found in a lack of thought in the design of the interfacing hardware.