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    Solamere Technology Group sells the Visitech QLC-100 (Yokogawa spinning
disk) system in North America in competition with PEs Ultraview. Our scan
head comes with dual camera ports. It also competes very favorably with the
Atto Carve, whose virtues were extolled by David Carter. David hasn't seen
our system so I presume he saw the PE version. As David mentions, he was
shown the ATTO system back at Atto headquarters, so I also presume no direct
comparison with the Yokogawa scan head was actually undertaken. What needs to
be done is a head to head on the same microscope using the same objectives,
cameras, specimen and with comparable illumination intensity. This means you
need to measure the light at the objective lens (which is not very easy to do
accurately).

    We supply the confocal with lasers (1 to 8 lines), Stanford Photonics
ICCD cameras and AOTFs, along with emission filter changers and microscope
automation, Z drives, piezos etc. As for the AOTFs, we were the first use
these with the disk confocal scanners and have more experience with this
technique than our competition. The through put of the AOTF can be as high as
95% at 488 nm. Careful alignment of the fiber optic to the beam exiting the
AOTF can produce coupling efficiencies as high as 83%. 0.83 x 0.95 = 79%
total through put. For demonstrations, I travel with a three line argon
laser, carried in airline baggage, and can get  >75% through put from the
laser to the distal end of the fiber. The beam quality of the laser and
driver of the AOTF must be optimized to obtain this.  We will have this set
up at Cell Biology (exhibit #916), at Biophysics, and at FASEB for those of
you who want to see first hand.

As to the best system for live cell confocal imaging:
Alison North (Hi Alison), correctly points out that the spinning disk
confocal is much kinder to live cells than the LSMs. She also mentions : "I
myself have found that using one YFP-tagged nuclear protein I could only
collect 4 time points on the
DeltaVision before it had bleached away, but I could keep imaging for hours
on the spinning disk system.  ....... be aware that your exposure times
will be much longer on the PE, so that unless you have an incredibly bright
signal you can't really use it at anything like the frame rate it can
potentially acquire."

The Scan head that Alison uses is essentially the same one that we sell. But
it's the camera that makes the big difference. Our high resolution (better
than 350 nm line pairs) ICCD cameras can operate at 20 times the speed or
with 20 times less light than the best cooled CCDs.   Less light = Less
damage, longer experiments and greater productivity. The image acquisition
rates of these cameras are now up to 1000 fps. So if you're interested in
pushing the boundaries of live cell confocal imaging or just want to protect
your cells from photo-damage, contact us.

For "real time" confocal imaging, the computer and software of course must be
able to keep up with a 60 MB per second data stream (10- 16 bit, 1k x 1k
images at 30 fps). Our software does this on Macs and now on PCs.

Best regards to all,

George A. Peeters M.D., M.S.
Solamere Technology Group
Salt Lake City UT
tel/fax 801 322-2645
www.solameretech.com