Hello Stereolabs Team,
I am evaluating the ZED 2i and ZED X for a precision autonomous agricultural navigation system on a Jetson Orin Nano Super with a u-blox X20D dual-antenna GNSS (RTK + PPS), GPS-disciplined to ~1–5 µs via KernelPPS + chrony. Timestamping accuracy is the primary deciding factor in my camera selection.
I came across the forum thread comparing the two cameras ( Technical Comparison: ZED X vs. ZED 2i Depth Accuracy and Reconstruction in High-Velocity Scenes ) which confirmed that the ZED 2i has no hardware sync and that GMSL2 provides advantages over USB. I could not find specifications for frame timestamp accuracy in your documentation, so I wanted to ask directly:
- What point in the frame pipeline does the SDK timestamp represent? Is it tied to exposure start, mid-exposure, or host-side frame delivery?
- For the ZED 2i over USB, what is the expected jitter between the true exposure moment and the SDK timestamp on Jetson Orin hardware? Is the camera clock correlated to the host clock, and if so, how?
- For the ZED X over GMSL2, does the CSI path on Jetson result in a more deterministic timestamp than USB? Is the timestamp accuracy characterized anywhere for this configuration?
- Given the ZED 2i uses a rolling shutter, does the SDK timestamp refer to a specific row, the start of the scan, or some other reference point?
- What is the typical latency and variance between IMU sample timestamps and the corresponding image frame timestamp for each camera?
Any datasheet, application note, or engineering guidance covering timestamp accuracy would help thanks.