Blog

Avoiding microscope repairs sometimes just involves a small bit of knowledge about your microscope. Here are a few pointers to hopefully help you avoid microscope repairs. Read the microscope instruction manual. Most people never read this and although it might seem boring and tedious, there is often good information in the microscope manual that can save you time and headache down the road. Do n …

Polarized Light Microscopy Polarization contrast is a contrast method to detect birefringence, which is a material characteristic that can be found in minerals, polymers, crystals, pharmaceutical samples, biomedical samples and even botanical samples. Birefringence is the optical property of a material having a refractive index that depends on the polarization and propagation direction of light. I …

Andrologists use a semen analysis microscope to view both the quality and the quantity of sperm to help determine male fertility. Semen samples must be kept warm with a heating stage in order to keep the semen living during sperm analysis. When viewing living samples, phase contrast microscopy is used to avoid harming the sample. Other samples are often stained in order to better view the sample. …

A common question when viewing a microscopy image on a large screen is: What is the total magnification I am viewing on my monitor?" In order to correctly calculate the answer to this question, we must know the answer to the following four questions. What is the microscopes objective's magnification? What is the c-mount adapter's magnification? What is the diagonal measurement of the monitor in m …

Have you ever looked through your microscope at a beautiful image in high magnification and wished you could capture more of the image than what you see through the field of view? Many microscope digital cameras have an image stitching feature that will allow you to do this. Some microscope digital cameras include software that has a feature specifically for image stitching. The way in which most …

Many upright microscopes have focusing eyepieces. These eyepieces can be adjusted by each microscope operator to ensure that the image is crisp and clear for their eyes. The focusing eyepieces adjust for any differences in vision between an individual person's two eyes. Properly setting up the focusing eyepieces takes a few simple steps and should be performed by each user, since the settings will …

Foreign materials in food need to be identified with a variety of food analysis methods for safety reasons. Food analysis microscopes are used to identify ingredients that go into prepared foods, additives, as well as undesirable substances including toxins or prohibited substances including glass fragments, metals, plastics, stone or even fragments from the food itself. A microscope is used to se …

Microscope World was recently approached by a customer interested in viewing their manufactured fabric knit under the microscope. We knew the FZ6 stereo microscope would do the trick, but were uncertain which microscope illuminator would work best. Our microscopy experts pulled out some microscopes and put the fabric to test. The first microscope tested was the FZ6-ILS2 stereo microscope. This m …

Recently we heard from folks in several locations who wanted to offer microscopic hair analysis for their customers. This make sense because hairs are pretty narrow so any kind of visual analysis requires a microscope. These entrepreneurs want to provide consultations based on their microscopic analysis of hairs that customers provide them. Being microscope experts, we thought we would help these …

The American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists (AATCC) has developed numerous standards for the performance of test methods related to the textile industry. AATCC Test Method 20 and Test Method 20A are two methods dealing with fiber analysis which require the use of a microscope. The methods themselves are quite fascinating. Method 20 has all sorts of qualitative procedures to help ide …

When setting up a compound microscope, it is important to optimize the illumination in order to produce clear and crisp images. There are four areas that should be considered when setting up the microscope illumination. #1 - Microscope Rheostat The microscope rheostat control can be found on the side of the compound microscope body. It will typically be a knob that is turned clockwise in order to …

A microscope creates a circular image, as seen through the eyepieces. Microscope digital cameras have a sensor that creates a rectangular shaped imaged. When connecting a microscope camera to the microscope, a c-mount adapter is used. C-Mount adapters are available with different magnifications (1x, 0.65x, 0.5x, 0.35x) and pairing these de-magnifying adapters with camera image sensor sizes (1/3", …

The microscope beam splitter is found on most trinocular microscopes. The beam splitter controls the light that travels up to the camera on the trinocular port. Depending on the type of work you perform with the microscope, you may want a different type of beam splitter. (Some trinocular microscopes do not have a beam splitter and in that case light is being sent 50% to the eyepieces and 50% to th …

Microscope World recently helped the Alaska Department of Fish & Game get a microscope for use at their William Jack Hernandez Sport Fish Hatchery located in Anchorage. This fish hatchery is a fully enclosed, recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) facility that uses technology to conserve water and reduce heating demand for the production of Chinook and coho salmon, rainbow trout, and Arctic c …

Microscope World recently took an old vinyl record and put it under a metallurgical microscope to see what the grooves looked like at high magnification. This first vinyl record image was captured at 100x magnification using reflected light through the objective lens.  A 6.3 megapixel microscope digital camera was used to capture the images. Any guesses as to which album this is?! This final …