I completely agree with Sam.  As the person who probably suffered most from
the dysfunctional NORAN confocal at UCSD I know this story well.
We use the Macintosh Version of Odyssey that is not produced (but
commissioned, as I understand) by NORAN.  We had the following problem:
Upon start-up several interactions take place between the CLSM and the
computer.  One of those is needed to calculate the right astigmatism
correction factor - important if you are trying to do double labeling
experiments.  For more than a year, this single event didn't happen on our
machine, resulting in one of the two images (with either the 488nm or 529nm
exciter filter) being terribly distorted.  After almost one year of
problems the bug was finally fixed by the programmer of the Mac Odyssey
software - who found that one of our system extensions was not compatible
with his hypercard written program.
It is correct that this wasn't a NORAN problem in the narrow sense.
However, if they had agreed to send over an expert 9 months earlier to
diagnose the problem (which was obviously beyond our skills) this would
have prevented much damage to my scientific project.
I am not really criticizing NORAN, and I had very good interactions with
their engineers who always appeared helpful and friendly to me.
Nevertheless, I would have greatly appreciated if NORAN gave us a little
more help with this particular problem even though it was not exactly their
fault.
Besides that I think the NORAN confocal is a fine instrument.  I would also
strongly recommend to buy the entire package from them - including software
and computer - rather than the CLSM only.
I hope this helps to finish the discussion.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
From:         Jacques Paysan, Ph.D.

Address:     Dep. Biology, 0357
                   University of California, San Diego
                   9500 Gilman Drive
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Phone:       ( 619 )  534 47 47
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Webpage:  http://crayfish.ucsd.edu/~paysan