SPOT Microscope Cameras 
Documentation cameras are designed to provide excellent presentation images that are geometrically correct, color balanced and visually appealing. To provide the best presentation images, arithmetic adjustments may be made to the pixels values to enhance the image for presentation. Generally the images provide accurate special relationships between features in the image and can be used for geometric measurement depending on the accuracy of the lens system. Although these cameras are designed to provide visually appealing images, as do many competing documentation cameras, SPOT Documentation cameras are typically based on higher quality scientific grade CCD sensors. The result is lower noise and higher sensitivity, which provides overall cleaner images with higher dynamic range that is important for any post processing operations.
Points to Consider When Selecting a Digital Camera:
Sensor Selection:
CMOS sensors provide high resolutions images of bright and brightfield specimens at a very affordable price. The SPOT CMOS sensors have performance characteristics equal to many low cost consumer grade CCD-based cameras and are considered our entry level imaging sensors.
All of our CCD sensors are premium quality scientific grade sensors. The result is lower noise, higher sensitivity that provides over all cleaner images with higher dynamic range that is important for any post processing operations. In many cases our uncooled cameras will out-perform our competitor's cooled cameras that use consumer grade CCD’s.
Resolution:
Many customers generally assume that more resolution is better, and in many cases it is. But your application may benefit from lower resolution since there are trade-offs made to achieve higher resolution.
Higher resolution cameras will:
- Reduce the sensitivity of the camera.
- The sensitivity difference between two cameras with the same field of view will be directly equal to the ratio of the number of pixels they have. eg. 4Mp camera will be 50% as sensitive as a 2Mp camera
- It should be noted that binning of pixels can recover this sensitivity loss, but with a loss of color and resolution.
- Higher resolutions generally reduce the live preview frame rate as well as the high speed sequential image capture frame rate.
- Note that the SPOT software provides Acceleration modes for live imaging to trade off resolution for frame rate.
- SPOT software also provides the ability to use smaller regions of interest which greatly increase the frame rate.
Cooling:
Cooling provides noise reduction during extended exposures of low light level specimens. Non- cooled cameras may show “Hot Pixels” in exposures as short as 1 sec on low light level specimens with the cameras in high gain modes, but typically 3-6 second exposures are routinely acceptable. In general, cooling halves the dark current every 7º C drop in temperature.
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