Category: Uncategorized

Fujifilm and Panasonic have announced development of an “organic” photoelectric conversion layer in place of a traditional silicon photodiode used in conventional systems. Obviously it will take a while for this technology to trickle into the scientific market, but it promises another evolutionary step forward in the march of both digital image capture and cmos…

This is a cool attachment for the iPhone. An optical system that produces 20X-80x image magnification, and has a contained adjustable illumination source. This is an interesting product, as it will by no means replace a stereo scope for the obvious reasons, but will allow for access to magnification by people who could otherwise not…

Back in mid December I had the unpleasant experience of a large bird flying through my prop. In the aftermath of this event I learned that my engine had to be inspected internally, to determine whether any internal components were damaged due to the incident. My engine was due for an overhaul anyway, so I…

Canon is showing off a new CMOS sensor which it won’t really explain, but it compares the sensor to an EMCCD (3 chip) camera. The differences are amazing for color acquisition. Once this tech becomes quanitatively measureable, it will likely push EMCCD technology into the dust bin – but, as with all of these developments,…

I’ve been using an Ollo Clip for a few weeks now, and it’s a well established, very cool product for the iPhone. I’ve been using the 4S version, and the 5 version was also recently released. So – why buy an OlloClip? The iPhone camera, like every other cellphone camera, is limited primarily by two…

Having worked with Micro-Manager for the past several years, I’ve been intrigued by the progress and impact this open-source software platform has had in the life science imaging community. Micro-Manager is changing the way we think of device control software for microscopy. I had an opportunity to collaborate with Pariksheet Nanda, one of the most…

Quite a while ago, I posted on the super cool (literally and figuratively) Switch LED light bulb. These bulbs promised the holy grail: color quality, low operation temp via efficient cooling, and high power. Today I received news they have been released to market, so I decided to pick one up! I’ll be testing it…

For years lasers have been used as tweezers, but this is a new approach to using a laser as an attractive force. In a paper titled, “Experimental demonstration of optical transport, sorting and self-arrangement using a ‘tractor beam’”, the authors are able to experimentally demonstrate the pulling and rotation of microparticles, simply by altering the…

Interesting methods described in this paper from Stanford. As super resolution systems gain popularity, problems like this will become more apparent, so this has perfect timing… -Austin    

There’s a good article explaining the difference between these exposure modes here – http://alliedscientificpro.com/rolling-shutter-or-global-shutter-modes-for-cmos-cameras/?goback=.gde_1628247_member_202082300 Bottom line for any quantitative work is that rolling shutter may introduce a source of temporal error. You can consider a rolling shutter to a flatbed scanner in it’s readout. So, if an object is moving while the image is being…