Electron Microscope Camera Offers Flexibility

A flexible charged-coupled device (CCD) electron microscope camera has been developed for low-light fluorescence imaging, ultra-low-light luminescence imaging, and high-dynamic range brightfield imaging.

The camera features low dark current, stable high gain, and increased signal-to-noise ratio. It has a deep and stable cooling system, multiple pixel clocks, and advanced driving circuit designs. Fan-assisted air or circulating water provides a deep cooling system. It provides dark current levels down to 0.001 electrons/pixel/second with temperature stability of +/-0.05ºC at -80ºC.

In normal CCD mode, low noise means very long integration is possible as well as high dynamic range imaging. In electron multiplication mode, the stabilized low temperature cooling offers stabilized gain up to 1200 times over a wide range of ambient temperatures for live-cell biology applications. A special Photon Imaging mode allows for single photon imaging.

The new EM-CCD camera, called ImagEM, was developed by Hamamatsu (Hamamatsu City, Japan) and can also be used with confocal microscopes. Synchronization modes allow perfect synchronization to spinning disk and multipoint confocals, even if the disk speeds are not constant. Shading and banding effects are eliminated.

Another new feature of the camera is the built-in real-time image processing functions for live recursive filtering, background subtraction, and shading correction. For high speed streaming applications, a built-in image processor relieves the computer central processing unit (CPU) of these tasks for faster image storage.

The readout speed, camera gain, exposure time, triggering-with-time delay, and polarity control for external devices, are all controlled by software for easy integration into any application or setup.



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