Do you offer educational discounts, sponsorships, or hardware donations?
Last updated: October 29, 2026
StereoLabs receives many requests from students, universities, scholastic teams, nonprofits, and independent developers asking for discounted cameras or hardware donations, often in exchange for sponsorship visibility. We are always impressed by how many projects in robotics, autonomous navigation, computer vision research, and AI are built with ZED cameras.
Students and academic teams have two options: our academic discount program and our experimental samples program, both described below.
Academic discount program
StereoLabs offers an academic discount program for students and academic institutions. To access it, contact us at support@stereolabs.com from your institutional email address, indicating your school or university, your role, and the products you are interested in.
Experimental samples program
StereoLabs runs an experimental samples program for students, individual researchers, and evangelists, which provides refurbished cameras to selected projects.
To apply, send a valid, detailed, and documented request to support@stereolabs.com, including:
who you are (school, research group, or organization) and your role;
a detailed description of the project, its goals, and the timeline;
why a ZED camera is needed and which model would fit your use case;
how you plan to share your results.
Each request is evaluated by a member of our sales team, who will propose the most relevant solution. Requests that are incomplete or not documented cannot be evaluated.
Tip: links to your social media posts about your projects, and project descriptions shared on our community forum, contribute to a positive evaluation.
Sponsorships and hardware donations
We work hard to keep the prices of our products as low as possible for everyone; for this reason, our policy does not allow us to offer sponsorships or donations of new products, even when marketing incentives are offered in return. Refurbished cameras are only available through the experimental samples program described above.
Other ways to get started
30-day return policy: if you purchase a camera from the StereoLabs store and find that it is not a good fit for your project, you can return it for a refund within 30 days of delivery, minus shipping costs; see What is StereoLabs' return policy?
Free software and resources: the ZED SDK is free, and you can find help in our documentation, in this Help Center, and on our community forum.
Try before you buy: you can test the ZED SDK without a camera by using recorded SVO files; see Are there video samples from ZED cameras that I can test before purchasing?
Finally, if you build something truly amazing with a ZED camera, we would love to hear about it: share it on our community forum, or send your project description and your social media post links to support@stereolabs.com. We are always happy to showcase outstanding projects on our social media channels.