Sensors are directly coupled to a custom designed fibre optic taper with an active area of 250mm x 125mm giving an effective pixel size of just 31.2 microns.  The very highest sensitivity in low flux situations is achieved by the incorporation of a fully stabilised liquid cooling system coupled to the CCD sensors. This significantly reduces dark current and hence its associated thermal noise.
As with many other Photonic Science camera systems, the VHR 3x1 X-Ray imager can be operated in both 12 bit and 16 bit mode using our 16-bit fusion driver. This provides up to an equivalent of 800 000 e^- per pixel full well capacity with true 16 bit dynamic range.

The acquisition system for this camera has been specially optimised for fast readout and processing times allowing high resolution images to be fully corrected and delivered to disk in less than 3 sec.
The Gadolinium oxysulphide scintillator is fully characterised to provide high-resolution images optimised for x-ray energies of 5-35Kev. This makes the X-ray VHR 3x1 an excellent choice for the most demanding of scientific applications such as diffraction, protein crystallography, WAX and GiSAXS.