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G'day Graig,

If I may answer a question you haven't asked!....

Before making a decision on a dipping lens (presumably you are going to
purchase a whole new confocal / multiphoton to go with that lens), you
should ask all the manufactures to report what percentage of the back
focal plane of the dipping lens is filled. Ask for a report from the
factory (don't rely on a response of the sales team on this one, they
are not likely to be aware). Also let them know that it is easy enough
for you to test, that way you will receive a frank response.

Many of these High NA, Low magnification dipping lenses are drastically
under filled. Hence they are only operating at a fraction of the
nominated NA unless installed on the physiology microscopes for which
they were developed. Unless we ask the manufacturers to do something
about that nothing will change. 

If a 20x dipping lens and a 60x dipping lens are marked with the same
NA, then the 20X lens used with an optical zoom of 3 should perform
similarly to the 60x lens at a zoom of 1. This would be of benefit for
live cell experiments as you could use low power to find the cells of
interest and then simply zoom in for high resolution images.

However, I believe in most installations the high NA 20x dipping lenses
are under filled and so this strategy does not usually work. 

Cheers

Stephen H. Cody
Microscopy Manager
Central Resource for Advanced Microscopy
Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research
PO Box 2008 Royal Melbourne Hospital
Parkville, Victoria,      3050
Australia
Tel: 61 3 9341 3155    Fax: 61 3 9341 3104
email: [log in to unmask] 
www.ludwig.edu.au/labs/confocal.html
www.ludwig.edu.au/confocal



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