however those skilled in the art will appreciate that computer workstation 210 may comprise any type of computer such as hand held devices multiprocessor systems microprocessor based or programmable consumer electronics minicomputers mainframe computers and the like the computer workstation 210 may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices fig3 is a flow chart setting forth the general steps involved in an exemplary method 300 for determining the lay length of s z strands during the manufacturing process the implementation of the steps of method 300 in accordance with an exemplary embodiment of the present invention will be described in greater detail in fig4 through fig6 exemplary method 300 begins at starting block 305 and proceeds to subroutine 310 where the image data of the s z stranded buffer tube 105 of the advancing fiber optic cable 100 is captured and uploaded to the computer workstation 210 the steps comprising subroutine 310 are shown in fig4 and will be described in greater detail below next the method proceeds to subroutine 320 where the image data is displayed the steps of subroutine 320 are shown in fig5 and will be described in greater detail below the method continues to subroutine 330 where the lay length of the s z stranded buffer tube 105 is calculated the steps of subroutine 330 are shown in fig6 and will be described in greater detail below from subroutine 330 exemplary method 300 ends at step 340 fig4 describes the exemplary subroutine 310 from fig3 in which the image data of the s z stranded buffer tube 105 of the advancing fiber optic cable 100 is captured and uploaded to the computer workstation.