Manufacturing speed and innovative designs are two crucial issues affecting whether or not a manufacturer can lead the mobile telephone market. Therefore, mobile phone manufacturers have put considerable efforts into accelerating the product development process, including the introduction of 3-D scanners into the prototyping and quality control stages to significantly speed up the overall manufacturing process.

Compared with CMMs or microscope measuring methods, 3-D scanning obtains much more data at a much faster speed. Typically for each scan shot, a 3-D scanner acquires information for two to five million points on the object. Based on this information, professional inspections such as distortion analysis, distance measurement, and so on, can be carried out automatically in inspection software. In this way, the overall cost can be noticeable cut down by simplifying and shortening the entire designing process and skipping trial and error stages. Moreover, even free-form surfaces of the object can be inspected, which also contributes to improving the objects’ exterior quality.

 …