Spot™ Cooled Color Digital Camera for Light Microscopes The first cooled CCD color digital camera designed specifically for a microscope!

Diagnostic Instruments, Inc., has designed and developed an extremely easy to use cooled CCD color digital camera for use with light microscopes. A 1.4 million pixel CCD provides crisp, vivid 24 bit color (8 bits per color) resolution images.

Diagnostic Instruments has utilized over 30 years of experience in the microscopy marketplace to produce a color digital camera made for a microscopist. Most digital cameras are developed for commercial use (graphics art, media, etc.) or for personal home computer use. These cameras have many shortfalls when it comes to adapting them to microscopes including vibration, difficulty of operation, slow speed (scanning cameras), and color interpolation which affects spatial resolution.

The SPOT cooled color digital camera is adaptable to almost any microscope using Diagnostic Instruments’ wide range of digital camera to microscope adapters.

Why this camera works well on a microscope…
Extremely easy to use software interface with image acquisition, annotation an database archiving system. Easy to use Auto Exposure and White Balance creates spectacular images in one stroke of the computer key. The software interface can be used (via Twain driver) with other, more complex software packages such as Photoshop, etc. but it is designed to be used as a stand alone, easy to use system.

Cooled CCD
The Peltier method is used to cool the chip -12°C (at 25°C ambient room temperature). This provides brilliant low light level color images for applications such as fluorescence, polarized light, darkfield, and high magnification work. The software allows the user to choose between shorter exposure, lower quality images and longer exposure (out to 17 minutes per color) high quality low light level images.

Speed
Image acquisition on a Pentium 166 computer takes about 15 seconds from the time the user "takes the picture" to when the image appears on the monitor.

Resolution
The CCD chip has a resolution of 1315 x 1035 pixels. By exposing the CCD three times (once each for red, green and blue), we are able to get true and accurate values for each color on every CCD pixel. Other color digital cameras use CCD chips that have red, green and blue color filters physically bonded to the pixels. Some pixels get red filters, others get green or blue filters. Interpolation is done on these cameras to "fill in the blanks" when assigning the missing two color values to each pixel (i.e. when assigning red and blue values to a pixel that had a green filter). The SPOT camera gives you confidence that each pixel in your image was measured, not interpolated.

Applications
The SPOT cooled CCD color digital camera provides a viable alternative to film photography and a much higher image capture resolution than achieved by an analog camera-framegrabber combination. Microscopic digital image capture is applicable to all fields of microscopy that require documentation of a specimen including both biomedical and industrial applications.