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On 4/20/2014 8:41 AM, Andrew York wrote:
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>   I use the pco edge 5.5 and the pco edge 4.2, and other members of my lab
> use the Hamamatsu 4.2. They're all great cameras. The major difference for
> me between the pco and the Hamamatsu is that the pco SDK is freely
> available:
> http://www.pco.de/fileadmin/user_upload/db/download/MA_DCSDKWINE_114.pdf
> which allows me to write and publish code that talks to the pco camera.
>
>   The Hamamatsu SDK costs extra, and prohibits us from sharing code we write
> that talks to Hamamatsu cameras. This was a dealbreaker for me, so we
> complained to Hamamatsu. They were pretty cool about it, listened to our
> concerns, and worked out an acceptable solution. However, this process took
> too long and I didn't want to delay my project, so I'm using a pco 4.2 now.
> Other members of my lab had already bought Hamamatsu cameras and they're
> stuck using labview to control them.
>
>   My understanding is that the lower QE of the 5.5 chip is (part of) a
> feature, not a bug: you can have 5 transistors, lower QE, and choice of
> 'global' or 'rolling' shutter, or you can have 4 transistors, higher QE,
> and only 'rolling' shutter. Rolling shutter operation requires you to use
> pulsed, synchronized illumination, but is also lower noise, so we always
> use rolling shutter on the 5.5. If you don't use pulsed illumination, you
> get an effective 'blurring' in time across your chip. Since the whole point
> of an sCMOS is to go fast, it seems silly to me to use continuous
> illumination with rolling shutter in most cases. Of course, if you do use
> pulsed illumination, your illumination duty cycle goes down (to zero at top
> speed!)
>
> I have no experience with Andor's sCMOS, and would be curious to hear how
> they compare. Cooling? Does that matter at high speeds? Kurt Thorn has
> written about them:
> http://nic.ucsf.edu/blog/?p=464
> I'm not sure if he's used comparable pco or Hamamatsu versions.
We have two Flash 4.0 cameras, one of which is currently attached to a 
microscope (the other one should be set up next week; we had some 
trouble getting a PC set up to handle the camera and some of the legacy 
hardware on that microscope). Both the Flash 4.0 and the Zyla 5.5 work 
well. I have not done detailed side-by-side comparisons of the Zyla 5.5 
and the Flash 4.0 yet.  I hope to also get a PCO 4.2 this summer and 
test all three.

One thing I will say is that, in my opinion, the extra field of view on 
the 5.5 MP chip is not all that useful. We see some vignetting and 
significant aberrations at the edges of the field of view, so we almost 
always run our Zyla cropped to 2k x 2k.  My sense, without detailed 
testing, is that the Zyla and Flash 4.0 are pretty similar and that you 
would only notice the difference between them if you are really pushing 
the limits of the camera. We also mostly use the Zyla in rolling shutter 
mode with pulsed illumination, so the global shutter is not that 
important to us.

Kurt

>