Imaging, Microscopy and More

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…

Nice article on how to collimate current high power LED sources, and why it’s needed. http://lightguide.blogspot.com/  

If you need a low accuracy qualitative power meter, for either standard or laser light, or if you need to sample a light source for it’s speed/frequency, you can do so using a $5 electronic component called a phototransistor. Basically a phototransistor acts in a similar manner as a standard transistor, but instead of allowing…

Whether you tinker with optical components or professionally use them, sooner or later you’ll come across a optical component that isn’t marked. So, rather than toss it, can you find out what it’s performance and properties are? Yes and no – Of course one could place an optical component into a high accuracy device like…