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Dear Charles,

We do a lot of live cell imaging (also for longer period ~72 hours). Our 
experience showed that the box type incubators work better for this type 
of experiments. They clearly need a longer equilibration time (you need 
to switch them on 1-2 hours before your experiments), but afterwards 
offer superior stability. If you have a "decent" microscope, the focus 
drift over 24 hours is around the 0.5 micron. I need to mention, that we 
have air-conditioning in our rooms which is also advantageous in order 
to stabilize the conditions. (Simply speaking - it is also essential....)
Of course if for any reason you need to change the temperature in a fast 
manner - you shouldn't take these. We have three different incubators in 
our facility (Solent Scientific, the "Ludin-box and cube" from LIS, and 
incubators from the EMBL Heidelberg). All of these work fine in our 
hand, but there are considerable price differences (especially if you 
need also CO2 control). The Oko-lab system is quite similar to these so 
probabyl it will also do the job. If you have auto-focus (hardware) on 
your system, then you can choose almost anything - we have done 
experiments even with a slightly modified hair-dryer.

I have no commercial interest in any of the above mentioned products.

Cheers    Gabor

-- 
Gabor Csucs 
Light Microscopy Centre, ETH Zurich
Schafmattstrasse 18, HPM F16 
CH-8093, Zurich, Switzerland

Web: www.lmc.ethz.ch
Phone: +41 44 633 6221
Fax: +41 44 632 1298
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