another method of spot cooling (Score 2, Informative)

Many people have mentioned that you can use peltiers to cool the sensor below room temperture, This is probably the most cost effective way to do it, but since this is /., there's another really cool way to do spot cooling. If your lab has a clean source of compressed air, check out exair.com. These things are called vortex tubes, and can create incredible temperature deltas, that are ideal for spot cooling, provided that you can supply the amount of air it requires. I've been told that it's actually relatively quiet given how much air it consumes, but i have no personal experience with them. just make sure you keep the exhaust end away from anything you don't want to melt. I woulda used it to make coffee while cooling my processor, but not everyone can afford a pump and a tank that can maintain that kind of airflow at 100 PSIG. Oh, one other thing... have you considered the potential issues w/ cooling the chip to those temperatures? I'd imagine condensation would kill your image quality, and depending on how well the boards are made, the solder joints may develop stress fractures. I remember using cold spray to cool PCB's to make sure there aren't any cold solder joints on PCB's we test. Oh yea, you could also use cold spray instead of the votex tube, but something about that stream of hot exhaust seems strangely apealing.