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>Hi Benedikt,
>
>we acquired a Leica resonant scanner based confocal about 6 months 
>ago. Before buying this system we tested different types of 
>microscopes including three spinning disc based systems (Andor, PE 
>and Visitec QLC100), two point-scan based systems (Leica and Visitec 
>Eye) and the new Zeiss LSM5 Live system. We brought our own samples 
>(transgenic plant material) and used these to test the different 
>systems in terms of speed, photobleaching and overall image quality.
>
>We found the spinning disc based systems to be slightly faster than 
>the Leica system especially when acquiring square images (e.g. 
>512x512 pixels). However the speed of the Leica system increases 
>significantly when you reduce the number of lines in the Y 
>direction. You should have no problem acquiring 10 fps with a 
>resolution of 512x512 pixels resolution and about 15-20 fps with a 
>resolution of 512x128 pixels.
>
>In our experience the level of photobleaching is quite low when 
>using the Leica system. I would say it is comparable to the spinning 
>disc systems we tested and significantly lower than the Visitec Eye 
>system that bleached my sample (transgenic GFP5-ER plants) within 
>seconds (this system did however work nicely for calcium imaging in 
>dendrites so the level of photobleaching depends on the properties 
>of the fluorechrome).
>
>In the end we chose the Leica system because it was sufficiently 
>fast, had an adjustable and round pinhole making it fully confocal, 
>had low levels of photobleaching, had a very flexible bandpass 
>filter solution and could easily and relatively cheaply be upgraded 
>to a tandem scanner system (both resonant and conventional scanner 
>in the same system).
>
>
>Best regards
>Martin Seem
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Martin Seem
>Graduate student
>Group for Cell and Molecular Biology
>Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Thank you for this Martin,

Could you please tell us about the type of CCD cameras used with the 
various disk-scanners? EM-CCD or normal CCD?

Thanks,

Jim P.
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