Based on what the rep told me, the spec is < 10 electrons read noise
at 16.7 MHz.  The camera is cooled to 40 below ambient which is
better than the Orca which has a similar spec.  I believe the chip is
the same as the Orca (but I am blanking on which one this is!).

Registration looked pretty good though I was more interested in the
sensitivity (It looked better than the Spot II to me).  The color
acquisition stuff I did was bright field sectioned material so I
wasn't concerned with speed of acquistion and can't honestly remember
what it was.  You can focus in a B&W mode so it is not a problem in
this application.  If I want to do dual color fluorescence, I plan to
use one of Chroma's nice multi-band pass filter cubes and move my
excitation filter.  This would mean I could avoid any color shift
problems there.

My rep's name is Steven Saul at [log in to unmask] if anyone wants
more info. (I have no financial ties to Optronics).


>>I own a Spot II and agree the non-real time focusing problem is tough
>>for occasional users.  We just demo'ed Optronics new Magnifire
>>camera.  This camera is cooled 40 degrees below ambient, has a filter
>>wheel in front of the chip that allows RGB images or B&W, has
>>firewire transfer relying on an inexpensive generic card that comes
>>included, does 10 frames per second so it looks like real time (but
>>isn't quite) when focusing or moving the stage x-y controls.  It only
>>costs $13,200 list.  I find it far superior to the Spot II.
>
>Could you elaborate a bit? Does your last statement refer to handling
>only or to image quality and sensitivity also?
>
>I've only seen the magnafire demoed at a coference and I noticed that
>it took about 1.5-2s to switch filters which should have a noticeable
>impact on color acquisition speed. What was your impression?
>
>How about read-out noise? Optronics doesn't say anything about it in
>the specs and at 17MHz readout rate, it might be considerable. Did
>you compare it to the SPOT-2 in that respect?
>
>Also, did you check for registration problems when switching filters?
>Where you able to confirm that repeatability for the same filter
>position is less than 0.5 pixel?  (Constant shifts from filter to
>filter are not a big problem since you can correct for them in
>software).
>
>Beat
>
>
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