I can not judge if they are the best, and they probably are not the cheapest, but we have very good experiences with the Andor (www.andor.com) cameras for spectroscopic applications in the IR domain.

Thank you Florian. IR cameras from Andor are very interesting, Like you, I have got good experiences with andor. But unfortunately, their cameras are too expensive for me...

Kind regards.

Julien

Some CCD's have much better IR performance (peak at 600-700 nm), than most of CMOS and many CCD's (peak around 470) - so if you definitively need high spectral response at 980 nm look for particular CCD's. But it will not be much better than 5% of any low-cost cmos/ccd sensor.

You can find a comparison of spectral sensitivity of typical sensors here: http://archive.theimagingsource.com/en_US/search/?q=WP

And what is the power of the laser diode? Couple of years ago I have used cameras with KAI-1020 CCD and MT9P031 CMOS sensors (both have generic spectral sensitivity), laser diode 980 nm 10 mw or so, beam diameter circa 10 mm - I did not have a problem of low sensitivity at all. In worst case you can increase exposure and/or gain.

Thank you Sh. Nizamov for your reply. I think I finally found a good camera for my apllication (with a price / quality ratio that seems to me excellent). It is a Photonfocus camera (MV1-D1312I) equipped with a CMOS NIR enhanced sensor.