Everything I Love about Keyence
In the world of machine vision, Keyence is one of the biggest players at the table. It’s a Japanese company with a whole lot to offer, including a few quirks. After working with them for almost ten years, I thought I would share with you all the qualities and oddities that I have noticed about them.
The first thing that you will notice about Keyence is that they sell a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. It was only a couple decades ago that they only sold safety automation components (light curtains, interlocks, etc.) Now, they offer pretty much anything that you need for physical automation: cameras, sensors, data acquisition, web-line printers, CMMs, microscopes, PLCs, etc. I was shocked to hear that they started selling products for desktop computer automation. Yeah, that’s right, you can now buy Keyence software that will automate your mouse clicks and keyboard presses on your computer.
While a lot of the things they offer have direct comparison with products with other companies like LMI, Cognex, etc., some of the products that they offer are way ahead of the competition. It’s mind-blowing! Take, for example, their multi-spectral camera system. With one camera and one light they can instantly capture images in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared spectra—all within the blink of an eye. They were the first company that I knew of that offered a 64 Megapixel industrial camera (they may still be the only one that offers it). Their line-scan cameras include gyros and other sensors that make it so much easier to align to the web or conveyor belt.
My personal favorite is their Lumitrax system, which uses a synchronized lighting system to acquire multiple images of an object at a variety of different illumination angles. The processor combines the images to isolate the light that comes from glare and the light comes from diffuse scattering. The result is that it can very clearly find hairline scratches in complex and noisy images. I used it once to inspect a paper product that had printed pictures all over it. The Lumitrax made the ink printing invisible and only showed the scratches. If there’s anyone out there that wants some help with a Lumitrax system, I would be more than happy to have the opportunity to use one of those again.
The Lumitrax system from Keyence.
Most of Keyence’s products come with easy-to-use configuration software that, unfortunately for me, often makes it unnecessary to hire a system integrator. If you want to program a vision system, their software provides a graphical user interface in which you can drag and drop the appropriate vision processing step into the sequence. Even non-programmers (if they are relatively smart) can figure out how to use it in a few hours. From what I’ve seen, most Keyence sales representatives will configure the machine vision controller for the specific application at no extra charge. Essentially, the sales rep is a free integrator/consultant. Granted, you’re going to pay 4x more for the hardware than you would if you bought a simple machine vision camera, lens, controller, and LED light from another vendor, but that is probably less than it would cost to pay a consultant to integrate it all with custom code. For small projects, the Keyence approach can be the cheapest.
I would like to point out that not all Keyence vision projects can be solved by the sales rep and the end user. There are a lot of really complicated projects that need an experienced, Certified A3 Vision Professional (like me) that knows the best practices and tricks for extracting the right data from the images. Often, you can get the system to achieve 95% inspection accuracy within a few hours or days, but to reach 99% or 99.9% accuracy, you might need a machine vision engineer. Also, an integration consultant like me can put it all together with the rest of your automation solutions—the motion systems, the PLCs, conveyors, robots, etc.
One thing that you’ll notice right away about Keyence is that (and I’m going to say this in the most endearing way) they have one of the most aggressive inside sales programs in the automation industry. If you so much as download a single datasheet for one product, you can expect a barrage of emails and phone calls from a Keyence inside sales representative asking about your project. Some people may find it irritating, but I have come to love these friendly little sellers. They’re just trying to make sure their customers have what they need. In the age of AI-powered chatbots, it can feel good to talk to a real human being. And, I’ll bet they make a lot of customers happy that they bought the right hardware. I’m sure that Keyence is closing a lot of sales this way.
Let’s not pretend that Keyence is a quaint little mom-and-pop store. It’s a corporate behemoth with ¥992 billion Japanese Yen (about $6 billion USD) in annual revenue. Like most tech corporations, I’m sure that they’re making ludicrous margins on most of their catalog. However, I have been pleased that their salespeople are sometimes willing to go down in price when I need it. They may be profit-focused, but they’re willing to make a deal in many situations.
Probably the quirkiest thing about Keyence is that they have a strange rule about the use of their products in the defense industry. In 2019, I was interested in purchasing some very high resolution, non-contact distance sensors to be used in the manufacturing process of a munitions system component. The sales representative told us that that particular sensor was not allowed to be used for weapon applications, not just in the USA but for any country in the whole world, because it was literally the only commercially available sensor on the planet that had measurement resolution that good. They viewed it as a situation in which their exclusive technology was enabling the production of a weapon, which violated their company’s values. The people of Japan tend to be pacifist, so I didn’t find this policy very surprising. To be clear, this policy only affects exclusive Keyence technology (only a fraction of a percent of all Keyence products are exclusive—the rest have alternatives from competing vendors). Also, this was five years ago, so the policy may have changed. Whether you agree with the policy or not (personally, I fully support my country’s military), I found it refreshing that a corporation was willing to sacrifice profit to preserve one of its core values. For the record, we found a way to do the project by changing the system design slightly and by using a different sensor.
The biggest complaint that I have about Keyence is that they don’t have a formal partnership program with integrators. Other companies like Cognex and National Instruments will vet system integration companies and formally invite them into their ecosystems with training, co-branding, and sales cooperation. With Keyence, all I can do to work with them is to make friends with their regional salespeople. I wish I could corner one of the corporate executives in a bathroom and tell him “Help me help you! I could be your champion!”
Overall, Keyence is a company that has earned my respect. They’re an in-your-face, let-me-help-you kind of tech company that has expanded to the point where the industry can’t ignore them. And, even though they’re not exactly set up to work with integration consultants like me, I’ve still done several projects with them. I’ve enjoyed it each time.
Let me know what you think about Keyence and if you’ve had any good experiences with them.
