Support for Windows 7 with FireWire Cameras

Last Revision Date: 9/14/2015

This article presents our official support of Windows 7 with FireWire cameras and the known issues users may encounter. Information on support for cameras on Windows 8 is found in "What Windows versions are supported by Spinnaker, FlyCapture, Ladybug, and Triclops SDKs?"

With the Windows 7 standard IEEE-1934 driver stack, users can operate our IEEE-1394b cameras at full S800 speed in conjunction with other devices on the same host adapter card. As described in "Performance of 1394 devices may decrease after installing Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 or SP3," the Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Service Pack 3 low-level drivers currently limit 1394b devices to S100 speed, while the Windows Vista drivers limit devices to S400 speed. This limitation is removed in Windows 7.

Supported Products

The following table shows our earliest product releases that support Windows 7. All product releases following these versions support Windows 7. Releases can be accessed from the Download Site.

SDK Release (32- and 64-bit)
FlyCapture 1.x 1.8.3.23
FlyCapture 2.x 2.0.3.15
Ladybug 1.x 1.4.3.6
Triclops 3.x 3.3.1.3

 

Support for these products includes the following:

    • Signed drivers that have been fully tested against Windows 7.
    • Technical support for customers using Windows 7.

Current Known Issues

 Testing has highlighted the following problems and incompatibilities on Windows 7 systems with our current software releases: 

Issue Description Recommended Solution Components Affected
Windows 7-TWAIN 2.0 incompatibility. Use v2.0.9 of the TWAIN Data Source Manager (DSM). For more information, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/twain-dsm/files/. FlyCapture SDK-TWAIN interface.
Power management. Similar to Vista, power management features may enable CPU sleep states or throttling. A typically observed effect of these features is image tearing. We recommend that users configure their system to use the least aggressive power management schemes as a first step to debugging observed issues. All products.
Aero themes. Testing indicates these themes are resource intensive. We recommend disabling Aero themes as a first step when debugging any observed issues. All products.