Poor man's phase contrast...

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piotr
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Poor man's phase contrast...

Post by piotr »

... or why not use infinity corrected objectives on a 160mm tube.

I equipped my Zeiss microscope with a phase condenser. I don't have any phase objective yet, so I tried my old 20x/0.50 American Optical infinity corrected objective, which happened to have a perfectly matching diameter of phase annulus. Results are rather disappointing. This is the best picture I could get. You can see contractile vacoules and a nucleus, but overall quality is poor. Resolution suffers a lot, the picture is blurry.

Image

Anyone has a spare phase neofluar to sell?...
Piotr

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Re: Poor man's phase contrast...

Post by Guest »

piotr wrote:... or why not use infinity corrected objectives on a 160mm tube.

I equipped my Zeiss microscope with a phase condenser. I don't have any phase objective yet, so I tried my old 20x/0.50 American Optical infinity corrected objective, which happened to have a perfectly matching diameter of phase annulus. Results are rather disappointing. This is the best picture I could get. You can see contractile vacoules and a nucleus, but overall quality is poor. Resolution suffers a lot, the picture is blurry.

Anyone has a spare phase neofluar to sell?...
That's actually quite amazing Piotr, there seems to be quite a difference in how infinity objectives behave. How is this one doing in BF? I've tried once some infinity Zeiss (10 and 40x neofluar) on a Leitz 160mm stand, and couldn't really see a difference by quick glance, certainly not as dramatic as your image shows.
I'm having myself a Wild phase fluotar series, the 20/0.60 is an absolute stunner. You would probably have to make a condenser annulus yourslf, but it's well worth it!

Rene.

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piotr
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Post by piotr »

Rene, thank you for the comments.

The difference in brightfield is not as serious. The image is just a little bit more blurry and it seems to have an eyestraining effect. The phase contrast image looks a little bit better in real than on this picture, but not as good as on a dedicated AO scope.

I think I will experiment more. My poor imaging skills might be another source of the problem. And I hope to get a Wild objective soon!
Piotr

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