Adapter for Microscope?

[Caleb Royer]

I have an XL2 and Canon HG20, is there any kind of adapter that I can get for one of those camcorders to put on a microscope? the microscope only has one eye piece.

Thanks,

CJ

[Roger Van Duyn]

The eyepiece on most microscopes is 10X. If you remove the head, you can mount a camcorder that has a hood directly where the head was. If the camcorder doesn't have a hood, you can use a short piece of electrical conduit, anything to keep stray light off the camcorder's lense. The first time I used a styrofoam coffee cup with the bottom cut out. The company that serviced our microscopes wanted $800 for an adapter.

If your camcorder has a 10X zoom, you will match the microscopes own eyepiece when you zoom in all the way. You want to keep the microscopes light pretty low, and probably should use neutral density filters. It's helpful to have an external monitor for the camcorder. If you have a secure tripod, you can point the camcorder straight down to where the head of the microscope attached and lock it down.

The microscope used in this piece was a two headed teaching scope, the one the Indian Medical Technologist is sitting at in the video, and I took one of the heads off. Take a look Lab Week 2009 on Vimeo

Hope this helps.

[Caleb Royer]

Thanks a lot for the info! I tried it out with my HG20 and it works good except for the black around the edges. I haven't tried it with my XL2 yet.

[Roger Van Duyn]

Originally Posted by Caleb Royer

Thanks a lot for the info! I tried it out with my HG20 and it works good except for the black around the edges. I haven't tried it with my XL2 yet.

Just crop and zoom in your favorite video editor. You can colorbalance too to make the footage look right. What material are you capturing through the scope? Is it stained slides or a wet mount?

[Caleb Royer]

I am filming anything that moves.

Caleb

[Roger Van Duyn]

What kind of scope are you using? I see from your profile you're into wildlife video. Is what you are using a "dissecting scope", where the light comes from above, as opposed to the scopes we used in the medical labs, with the light coming from below the slide?

Some camcorders work well as "dissecting scopes" in their own right, just put them in macro mode and zoom in. Works well with insects etc. Haven't really tried that technique on anything really "microscopic". Maybe I'll play around a little myself and see...

[Caleb Royer]

Here is a link to the microscope I am using: Model 131 | National Optical
It does not work well at max magnification but middle magnification works very good. It is not powerful enough to see microscopic things but it works good for things like Gore Wasp larva (a small grub).

[Roger Van Duyn]

Okay, it's similar to the compound microscopes we used in the lab, but not as pricey, and we had more powerful objective lenses too. The model in your link had 4X, 10X, and 40X objectives as standard. With a 10X eyepiece, the magnification comes out to 40X, 100X, and 400X.

In the clinical lab, we had two more objective lenses, a 50X oil immersion, and a 100X oil immersion, which results in a magnification of 500X and 1000X, when we were looking at blood cells, bacteria, yeast etc. The oil immersion means we put a drop of oil on the stained slide, then lowered the objective lens into the drop of oil. The oil has similar optical qualities as the objective lens, insofar as light waves travel through it. I believe the technical term is refractive index.

Here's a link to one of the microscopes I used the most in my old job.
Nikon | Instruments Products | ECLIPSE E200

[Caleb Royer]

That's a nice microscope. Wish I had one but wishes cost a lot of money and I'm more into animals that you can see with your own eyes anyway.

[Roger Van Duyn]

Yeah, they can be a lot of money, but it wasn't my money. A lot of the equipment costs far more than the scopes. We had about 6 different analyzers that were well over $100,000 dollars each. Modern medicine is very expensive in the U.S.

[Bo Skelmose]

Hi
I use an Euromex with an B4 adapter. The camera is mounted directly to the microscope. This gives me the problem that there is no Iris on the system. My depth of field is almost nothing and it's a little annoying as I can easy put more light on the subject. I have not seen anything yet that really can do the job. I need to put my own cameras on to get HD and 16:9 - and 25P frames....
My pictures are just not as crispy and sharp as I dream off.
The picture is from a 4:3 video - cropped to 16:9 of an insect larvae thats digging holes in the sand and lying there - waiting for an ant to fall down in it...

[Roger Van Duyn]

Depth of field is extremely shallow using a microscope. In the lab doing coverslipped wet mounts, we would focus up and down through individual layers in the single drop of specimen. The depth of the region in focus would be about the same thickness as a single cell.

[Caleb Royer]

The D.O.F. problem is the reason I can't use my microscope on max magnification.

[Bo Skelmose]

I know - I just wonder if I had an iris - would I be able to change dof ?

[Roger Van Duyn]

Not with a microscope. With a microscope. With a microscope, even on the lowest power, it would be like extreme telephoto on your camera. If ocular is standard 10X, and objective is at the lowest magnification, typically 10X, then you are zoomed in 100X. Ocular and objective are multiplied together. Imagine what the depth of field on your camera would be with a 100X zoom lens. You wouldn't have very much depth of field, would you?

I don't believe it is physically possible to have a shallow depth of field with a microscope. I used them for hours daily for 30 years.