IMAQ questions

[MikeD]

I'm new to IMAQ and have some questions for you experts.

I have a Hitachi VK-C360 color camera (analog output) with a PCI-1405 board.

I did some tests with the examples and found that my images are B/W instead of color. What am I doing wrong?
I tried to send the image to a vi called 'Color image to Array' and found that the values in the array seems to belong to a color image. (values are like 16843265)

Is there a way to convert that image or array to a grayscale. For my application I need to take snap shots of my experiment in B/W and make an average of the level of grey for each image. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a b/w image should be 8 bits (0-255 in my array?)

And finally, I installed IMAQ 3.1 that came with my video card, but inside LV7.1 I don't see the image analysis tools, only the camera control vis. Are these tools supposed to be there? Where??

Thanks in advance

Michel.

[crelf]

The NI PCI-1405 is definately a colour acquisiton board, but I'd need a little more information to have any idea of why you're only getting monochrome out of it - can you post the VI you're using to the forum?

As for the NI-IMAQ issue - NI-IMAQ is litle more than image acquisition: basically, it's a driver. If you want all of the vision software for analysis, manipulation, etc, what you need is NI-Vision http://www.ni.com/vision/vdm.htm)

[MikeD]

Thanks Christopher for the reply.

Right now, I'm using examples that come with LV7.1 "Basic Color Acquisition.vi" is one vi I used to test, but had only B/W. I tought that may be the camera was defective, so I hooked up the camera to a color monitor, and there was color. The colors were not very bright though, so maybe the camera is not at its 100% and that is the cause of the problem. (threshold in the PCI-1045 card ?)

I found a way, using parts of multiple examples, to have a 0-256 level of grey out of my color camera, this problem is solved.

Thank you,
Michel.