MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

A slide of fluorescence beads and a stage ruler will work decently for it all. You can use the beads to demonstrate BF vs phase/DIC, because under BF, they are hardly discernable.
Any petrographic slide for polarised light.
Blood smears for phase, DIC and oblique.

Diatoms are adequate, but not quantitative. It fails as a decent reference and vintage slides were prepared with vintage techniques, making them somewhat unsuitable. As a general toll, sure, it works well enough. I love diatoms, I have invested lots of time and money in them but the idea of test dia...

No offence, just practice more. Do you use chopsticks? Pinch the pipette between two fingers and use your dominant hand to manipulate the pipette with the other being stationary. Do this under a stereomicroscope. This works very well for larger specimens. For smaller ones, you need something more el...

I am interested in the u-dic60. I will see if I can find a u-dic20 for the swap.

Any Olympus tube that houses correction lenses for the extension should work. The infinite versions are just mechanical raisers without correction optics, it could work but it will probably affect the viewing. Or I suppose you can DIY a raiser and use longer tube objectives, like 210 instead of 160.

There seemed to be some confusion on this in the papers and other stuff I looked at, but generally as far as I understood the averaging rule (especially if used as an approximation for real-world specimens) is only supposed to apply if NA_cond <= NA_obj. Yeah, that is where it falls short as a gene...

Rule number one to transporting a microscope is full disassembly, otherwise it will do so by itself and you would have a bad day. You are better off purchasing a large Pelican case with pick and pluck foam.

Evident is ultimately a Japanese company. Being a Japanese company, they suffer from all the shortcomings of Japanese company culture, no offence, I have worked for one and with many. They have tunnel vision, general stubbornness and simply cannot understand the western market. We often have to make...

I personally refuse to use this formula simply because a 1.4 NA Apl-Achr condenser fully open coupled with a 4x at 0.1 NA will not yield 0.75 NA. You will be better off using diatoms as resolution targets.

I will add one of those $120 PlanApo 20x objectives, the ones with branding.

Also hunt for a 10x cheap fluorite and 4x achromatic to use as finders.

The one I pulled apart must be very cheap or very old then, unfortunate. I have seen film type waveplates for less than $20 for a 50x50mm square. Supposedly they are used for screens.

A circular polariser consists of a 1/4 λ plate and a linear polariser. If you have one lying around, take it apart and you have your waveplate with an additional linear polariser.

The modern CX3 line are all mostly made in china, that does not mean a decrease in quality. As products go, you usually get what you paid for. They are still quite expensive, no more or less when they were produced in Japan. I cannot imagine a cx43 with phase contrast selling for similar prices to a...

Denkar was one of the many many white labelled Japanese optical products, others include Kenko, Sumo, Tasco, KKK-kogaku (yes, really :roll: ) and so on. Unless it has a made in Japan signage, you can probably assume it came from one of the few Chinese optics factories. The famous Swift field microsc...

Stick them into your tube.

I transported half a dozen with a commercial removalist, no damage. All scopes broken down. I sourced original boxes from Evident, when possible. For critical parts such as objectives and condensers, I did it myself with a Pelican case. Key is complete removal of all user-removable parts, otherwise,...

As originally stated: although the lower lens element works as a very nice ‘magnifying glass’ … I haven’t found any setting where the complete device will achieve focus ! … from which I would deduce that it is intended to work in conjunction with other optics, rather than just being a loupe. Michae...

It depends on what you want. If you want a first scope to mess around and then sell at a minimal loss, or even a small profit, the BH2 is pretty good. If you want a petrography microscope, I would personally choose the BH2 because parts are cheaper. A BX petrographic microscope would run you half a ...

onilink_ wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 04, 2024 10:48 pm

Is there a version with values < 1.0x? (It is even possible?)

No, but it is possible. I have seen an off-brand BX (u-ca) one with 0.5x.

I don't think it is possible to change a finite optics microscope to infinity-corrected. You would be better off getting higher-grade finite optics for your Ortholux 2. Main advantage of infinity systems is ability to insert additional attachments into infinity space. Being a beginner, it is not so...

The logo says 上海 which means Shanghai, likely it came from one of the three or four state-run optics enterprises back in the days. It does not indicate which factory, but perhaps a nameplate at the back would say something like 上海光學三廠 (Shanghai optics Co 3rd factory), indicating its origin. I own a ...

Fine focus assist to be used with a camera mount apparatus that had its own eyepiece, it mounts onto the eyepiece.

1. Higher RI so that NA 1 oil will be brighter than an NA 0.95 dry, most immersion oil RI ~ 1.52 (e-line), air ~1.00. This means a brighter fluorescence signal and better matched RI to the glass slip. 2. The 1.0 oil one does not care about the thickness of your coverslip (well unless it is thicker t...

That is totally BS, the effect can be demonstrated easily and 0.7 NA is already high enough to see the adverse effects of spherical aberration. Zeiss even made spehrical aberration compensation slides with a glass wedge. Either during that time, imaging systems were lacklustre and thus the effect wa...

1. Works 2. Why change to Halogen? PE-300 would work well. 3. No, unless you only want the polarisers always crossed which limits functionality. -1: one rotatable analyser, no passthrough slot -2: with passthrough slot -3: same as above but there are lots of fakes from a Nanjing factory flooding the...

There's gotta be something to that configuration for Nikon to build their entire super-resolution line around it, in addition to their line-up of conventional inverted scopes . All of these techniques are available for upright as well. Nikon like the other 3 are selling their top-line inverted micr...

40x.
Nucles stained with DAPI.

Thanks. I'm a bit confused: Get an abbe condenser which allows inserts to be placed at the back focal plane of the objective? My understanding is, I need to DYI a slide like the picture above, and also need to insert a varel ring at the back focal plane of the objective, right? The varel ring is ki...

I will be reluctantly selling off a large collection of petrographic slides soon, which includes some very large (X2 size of normal slide) meteorite (ll3 with small chondrules) slides that I specifically ordered.

I am planning to downsize my slide collection, so keep an eye.

Whatever trick is welcome: I see Zeiss has a technique called Varel, but very little information on the internet, have you seen anyone using it? This is something you can absolutely DIY. Get an abbe condenser which allows inserts to be placed at the back focal plane of the objective, and make yours...