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  I have some experience with this widefield hyperspectral imaging 
system, which is based on a tunable AOTF: 
http://www.olinet.com/products.php?&_act=manageProduct&DO=viewProduct&intProdID=53&product=Hyper/Multispectral%20Imaging%20System

It works well - continuously tunable center wavelength, multiple 
different widths for each passband, and very fast retuning from one 
wavelength to the next, but the out of band rejection of ~1:10^3 is 
non-ideal.  Of course, you also have to be willing to acquire your 
spectral images sequentially rather than simultaneously.

There are also tunable liquid crystal filters, but they take longer (100 
ms?) to change wavelengths.

For the application we're interested in, we've actually decided it's 
easier just to use a filter wheel and acquire hyperspectral images by 
using multiple bandpass filters.

Kurt

On 12/2/2010 11:10 PM, Andreas Bruckbauer wrote:
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> To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
> http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
> *****
>
>
>   Would it be possible to have a widefield hyperspectral microscope? For fast aquisition you would have to split the fluorescence somhow into different channels and this is usually limited to a low number of spectral channels, like four. In principle you could couple a spectrometer to the microscope and measure one wavelength at a time but this would be slow. The confocal option seems to be more apealing, is the Nikon C1si a point or slit scanning system? M. Sinclair et al. Applied Optics (2006) 45 6283 have build a slit scanning hyperspectral confocal which would be a good compromise. D. Lidke has used this system to separate 5 different quantum dots with a time resolution of 4s/frame (Immunity (2009) 31 469). The only system I know  which is widefield would be the imagestream imaging flow cytometer https://www.amnis.com/ which offers 12 simultaenous channels but in this case it is the cells which are "scanned" or flowing through the image instead of scanning the laser. Does anyone know of other options?
>
> best wishes
>
> Andreas