This year, Opto, leading German developer and integrator of specialist optical inspection technologies, celebrates its 30th birthday.
Opto was founded in 1980, in the small western district of Munich with a vision to be a supplier of custom solutions and accessories for stereo microscopes.  Today, the company has grown to a 30 person enterprise with worldwide sales and branch offices in France and the UK. To this day, every single component, module and system is designed, hand assembled and tested in house, at the Opto facility.

Commenting on the occasion, owner and CEO, Markus Riedi stated:
"We've come a long, long way in our 30 years, but always have evolved with the same simple 3-fold approach to our business: 1. to never stop learning about our core technologies, 2. to always push the boundaries of what is possible with our ability and 3. to enjoy what we do. This approach has enabled us to develop many totally unique optical solutions, modules and systems for some of the world's most demanding optical vision related applications. During our history, we are proud to have played our part in the ongoing advancement of industrial imaging science in numerous emerging technologies including: next generation laser eye surgery, miniature automated in-vitro imaging, laser security testing of smartcards and many many more. We thank each and every one of our valued customers and partners for their support and inspiration over the years, and for giving us the opportunity to apply our expertise to such fascinating and challenging applications. We look forward to continuing to develop such solutions well into the next 30 years!"

Proof of this success is documented in the standard products and solutions shown in the latest edition of Opto's Solino catalogues which will be launched at the Vision 2011 in Stuttgart early November. Its Solino identity contains Opto's most popular component and inspection instrument configurations, in addition to its numerous ranges of specialist machine vision optical components and accessories. The Solino brand is divided into 3 main colour lines - Machine Vision & Microscopy Components (Green Line), Inspection Instruments & Accessories (Yellow Line) and Image Analysis Systems (Orange Line).