Hello-

I am a graduate researcher in physics and am knowledgable about slr's, but have no experience in digital cameras. I have done some research, visiting olympus and kodak. I have acutally only found one camera that is officially capable of being integrated with a micrscope: the kodak dc 120. I guess that camera is so old, that is not even reviewed in the newsgroup. However, I have only heard mediorce reviews about its user interface and limited memory file formats. Also it has only a serial port, and I read downloading pictures takes a good minute...

so any experience of the dc 120, or knowledge of a digital field camera/microscope camera? Please help, my advisor expects me to find the right camera for our research group.... the other option is just to get the olympus 340L, and try to jig something up for a microscope...

thanks darron

-- darron young (darron@nori.qi.ucsb.edu), July 28, 1998

Answers

I can't pretend to know much about microscope optics, but this has to be a fairly common requirement. My best advice would be to call Edmund Scientific (sorry, don't have a phone number, but they shouldn't be too hard to find, they're in NJ somewhere) and ask someone there about microscope adapters for 35mm SLRs. You'll obviously want something that's made to mount on the front of the lens, rather than replacing it. (The Oly's front threads are 43mm, an odd size, but B&H Photo in NYC has step-up adapters to go to other sizes.)

The lens-reversing trick is common among macro photographers. You can actually get very good macro performance out of a garden-variety 50mm on your SLR just by reversing it with the appropriate (mfr-specific) reversing ring. The argument goes that the back side of the lens is adapted to imaging accurately for objects just a few mm from it, so if that's the sort of object you're shooting, that's the end of the lens you should shoot it with.

Stacking lenses is a bit trickier. What seems to work best is a wide-angle reversed on the front of a telephoto. To reverse-mount the 24mm Nikkor on my Oly 600, I used a 43-52 mm step-up ring on the Oly, a 52-52mm male-male adapter ring, and then screwed the Nikkor onto that, facing backwards. I got fairly severe vignetting in the corners of the field of view, but the magnification was incredible! I used this rig to shoot some ultra-macro shots for an article I just finished for Petersen's Photographic on inkjet printing and resolution. The 720-dpi inkjet dots from my (elderly) Epson Stylus II printer ended up about 5 pixels across in the final images. - I guess that makes each pixel equate to about 1/3000 inch! Of course, the working distance was very small, and focusing consisted of moving the whole camera/lens assembly back and forth. I also worried a bit about the strength of the (plastic) threads on the front of the Oly, with all that glass hanging off of them. Worked fine though.

Back to the microscope, I suspect you'll need some sort of lens arrangement that will diverge the cone of light coming out of a microscope ocular to help it fill the screen. Or alternately, you may need some other optics between the digicam lens and the attachment tube of the scope to do the same thing.

Anyone else out there have direct experience with this? If so, let us know!

Hope this helps.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), July 29, 1998.

Depending on your budget, you may have the best luck just "jigging" something. If you do though, you may want to consider a camera with accessory threads, such as the Oly 500 or 600, or the Nikon CP900. - I've had good results taking "super macro" shots by using a step-up ring on my Oly 600, then a reverser ring to mount my 24mm wide-angle Nikkor on the front. Pretty kludgey, but it's practically a microscope in its own right!

Other options (for more money) are the Polaroid digital microscope camera (I think about $5-6K, check their website), or Pixera makes a much less expensive unit (about $1K?) that direct-mounts to the microscope. Both of these units are tethered though, so they won't be dual-use as portable cameras.

Hope this helps. Good Luck!

-- Dave Etchells (detchells@imaging-resource.com), July 28, 1998.

(Darron - I took the liberty of posting your email to me here as part of the thread, so everyone could follow the conversation...)

Thank you very much. You gave me just enogh info to tease me though, so I will have to pick your brain further. I am not familiar with reversing lenses, but does it allow for a closer focusing distance, hense a higher reproduction ratio? Were you able to acheive higher than 1:1?

As far as considering a camera with threads, like the OLY 600, do you know what would be involved (as far as optics,lenses are concerned) other than having some adaptor piece that attached the camera with the microscope's trinocular eyepiece? Thank you and I appreciate your help.

-- darron young (darron@nori.qi.ucsb.edu), July 29, 1998.

If you are looking at the microscopes, look at the binocular head to see if there's a knock-out ot plug or screwed in plug that might allow you to add a C-mount adaptor. Edmund scientific sells high resolution color and b/w cameras that will fit your microscope.

But then, if you only had a Leica; it comes with a camera mount port, eh?

-- Cal Hoe (calvin.hoe@leica-microsystems.com), September 15, 1998.

Unfortuantely no. Noone as yet has taken advantage of the consumer machines to make one that will work. Alterntives (overpriced IMO) inlcude the Pixera and Sound vision cameras but these things , beside high prices ALSO have th dumb feature of needing PC's to take pictures! Sound vision actually requires Photoshop.

You best bet is to wait or buy a digicam and hack the lens of to build your own.

Edmund is not much help. They do have the necessary optics but you would have to do oyur own engineering. But ... you are in a physics Dept so your shop may be able to do the work. PLEASE let me know if you solve this problem.

-- Steve Schwartz (Steves@u.washington.edu), December 27, 1998.