I have a question - which probably best belongs as a continuation of this thread.
Can anyone verify that the distance from the objective shoulder to the head flange top is 47mm on a PZO Biolar?
For reference, both Olympus and Zeiss have about 40mm distance from the objective seat to the top of the stand where the head mounts. I'm told (from another site) that this distance is 47mm for the PZO Biolar and that their head optics are designed with this distance in mind.
FWIW, I've retrofitting a PZO DIC system to an Olympus BHT - maybe eventually to a Zeiss WL if I get that together. For the BHT, I made an adapter to fit the PZO dovetail to the Olympus BHT and then another adapter to fit an Olympus BH head to the PZO MPI5. Then chopped a bit of length from the Olympus head tubes to get everything back to about 160mm tube length (less the MPI-5 DIC unit, which compensates for its own length).
The 40x images (400x) were soft when the tube was a too long - quite nice with it chopped back a bit.
The reason for asking in this thread? I suspect others adapting PZO DIC to another stand (BHT, Zeiss, etc.) will have some effects from a-bit-too-short a tube length given the number of PZO adaptations I see (Ebay etc.) mounted directly to something like a Zeiss stand with no corrections for the expected tube length before and after the DIC unit. While low magnifications don't much care about plus or minus 7-10 mm of tube length, the higher magnifications do and the effect was quite visible in my case.
This turns out to be a surprisingly good DIC unit. It takes a bit of fiddling to get everything in adjustment. And the field of view isn't up to modern standards. But, it also doesn't cost an arm and a leg. The images are good and it looks like this could become a great unit for something like video recording protists.
One plus of using something other than a Biolar (other than
having the other scopes) is that the illumination systems are better. The PZO DIC system wants a lot of light.
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- PZO_BHT_DIC_adapters.jpg (60.06 KiB) Viewed 6941 times