On this page I briefly explain an efficient and powerful solution to obtain high quality digital photomicrographs on a microscope.
I use two different cameras, one from SONY (DFW-X700, 1024x768 pixels, 15 frames per second, no longer in production) and one from a company called The Imaging Source (DFK 41AF02, 1280x960 pixels, 7.5 frames per second). These are so called c-mount digital video cameras and are primarily designed for machine vision applications. But they can connect to any microscope with a standard c-mount camera connector.
These cameras connect to the computer via the FireWire port (IEEE 1394, 400 Mbit) and they usually draw the power from the port itself (i.e. from the standard 6-pin FireWire port on any Mac). On PC notebooks there often is only a 4-pin FireWire port (also called iLink), so in that case you would need an external power source.
To run the camera I use a shareware software called BTVPro that can aqcuire video from many different sources. It unfortunately has not been updated in quite some time, but there is a beta version that also runs on the latest OSX (including 10.5).
This setup allows to have a full resolution preview window (make sure you have a screen big enough to display the entire image), and pictures are taken at the click of a button, and they correspond exactly to what you saw on the preview. I find this by far the most convenient set-up I have seen so far. Some special microscope cameras offer higher resolution and higher sensitivity under low light conditions, but the convenience of a full-size preview at a decent frame rate with a simple software is hard to beat.
Please contact me if you have questions.
Cheers,
Lukas