Digital Image Capture for Confocal Microscopy

Abstract

Good microscopy includes optimizing the information obtainable from your confocal image with the minimum amount of effort and time. A key to achieving this goal is to match, as closely as possible, the parameters of all hardware and software in the image collection train. For reasons outlined later in this chapter, it is particularly important to match the resolution of your digital image to the output resolution from the microscope. In, we discussed the resolution parameters of the digital image. In this chapter, we cover the optical resolution obtainable from fluorescence confocal light microscopes, we review the important parameters of the image acquisition hardware that influence image information, and we illustrate how to match these two parameters to optimize confocal image acquisition.