A new portable spectral camera system for the cultural heritage conservation market
Art conservators & Cultural Heritage preservation institutions need more analytical means to control their interventions in order to guarantee the maximum possible quality in their work. For that they need to know and understand their subject of work - the art piece - and the materials that were used to make them – this currently has enormous lab costs that make only the finest pieces eligible for analysis.

Signinum has developed a European patent-pending portable spectral camera system, XPECAM, that has specific technical features for the cultural heritage conservator’s work combined with a user-friendly interface that removes the need for external lab tests on art works or structures – this increases the added value of the conservator’s work while reducing time and external costs.

The end-user of XPECAM is the conservator and the product can be sold directly to them, or to museums, conservation institutes or universities. The EU market is hard to assess, but we estimate at least 210M€ of unexplored market, that still needs to subcontract tests to specialized labs (we have also been studying the Brazilian market, valued at 70M€).

Signinum was founded in 2001 and had record 4,3M€ turnover in 2017, focusing on Cultural Heritage Conservation, with a team of 65 experts acting in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Latin America. XPECAM was originally created to meet our own lab’s needs, and we have several partners (museums, conservators, etc.) willing to buy the product when fully ready (although we have already sold 2 prototypes to clients in Portugal and France), demonstrated with letters of intent in this proposal and we need the support of SME Instrument to achieve a commercial product that can be produced in large scale.