Five Products to Enhance Your Microscopy Work

29.06.21

Looking to upgrade your microscope or support new applications – or develop something unique? If you have a microscope with great optics, but it doesn’t quite meet the needs for your current needs, there are many ways to enhance the way you work. Here are five products from Prior that can improve your microscopy work.

1. PureFocus 850 Laser Autofocus

Laser autofocus systems, such as the PureFocus850, are routinely used for materials or biological microscopy, but did you know that the PureFocus is not tied to any specific application? Due to a versatile set of parameters, the PureFocus can maintain focus on your sample in real-time, independent of contrast, sample flatness, or image acquisition, using almost any objective and imaging a vast range of samples. Semiconductor wafers, fixed slides, culture dishes and well plates, films and membranes, pharmaceutical pills are just a few of the different sample types that have been tested successfully. Similarly, microscopes from major manufacturers, or home-built research instruments, can equally benefit from the PureFocus 850 as it can adapt to almost any infinity corrected optical configuration.

2. Nanopositioning Stages

Did you know Prior now offer world leading nanopositioning stages for microscopy? Queensgate SP400/SP600 Nanopositioning Piezo Sample Scanners offer the fastest step settle times available – 7 ms for 1 micron, 20 ms for 100 microns. These systems can also operate over ranges of up to 600 microns while maintaining these high speeds and sub-nanometre resolution, and even be operated in a constant velocity mode triggering cameras at regular intervals. Applications such as multiphoton imaging can benefit from all of these characteristics to generate more accurate 3D data in bigger volumes much more quickly.

3. Nanopositioning Objective Positioners

Queensgate products achieve their prolific performance by having an inherently high resonant frequency, allowing them to move rapidly without resonance, and low noise electronics in the order of magnitude as the width of a hydrogen atom. The OP400 objective positioner offers the same exceptional performance as the nanopositioning stages and enhanced linearity and stability. Its 400 micron range has enabled novel correlative light sheet microscopy of thicker samples, while its short settle time allows higher rates of acquisition of volume data.

4. Linear Stages

Prior’s HLD117 linear stage is best known as a high content screening tool for well plates – frictionless drives allowing for extremely rapid movements and constant velocity scanning, while triggering image acquisition at 30 nm metric accuracy. These stages are now being used frequently in materials science as well – 100 nm repeatability enables correlative high-resolution imaging with mass spectrometry, and its high accuracy and resolution are utilised in high throughput laser etching applications.

5. OpenStand custom microscopes

Did you know Prior can be your partner for customized, fully motorized imaging system development? We have worked with industry and academia to produce microscopes to meet specific needs through our OpenStand. It's a production-ready frame that can be customized with bespoke optics, illumination, 3 axis motorized travel, and even robotic sample loaders to create a system perfect for your application. OpenStand is used in a diverse set of applications, like a novel digital pathology slide scanning and correlative determination of physical and electrical properties of semiconductors. Find out more about our OpenStand: download the brochure.

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