The wrong first question is "What camera should we buy?"
The better first question is "What problem are we solving?"
The requirement hierarchy
- Business requirement - what outcome does the organization actually need?
- Inspection requirement - what must be detected, measured, or classified, and how reliably?
- Hardware requirement - only now does it make sense to choose optics, lighting, and a camera.
The trap
Hardware is concrete and easy to order, so teams jump to it first. But hardware bought against an unclear requirement tends to be either over-specified (wasted money) or subtly wrong (wasted months). The cost of getting this backwards is almost always larger than the cost of the hardware itself.
Understand the problem before buying equipment.